Ever wondered how much open-source software is really worth? Well, the Linux Foundation has just attempted to answer it as best as it can in a new report that looks at the development costs of Linux-based collaborative projects.

It’s challenging to put a price tag on open-source software platforms for numerous reasons. The most obvious reason is that open-source software is free to download and use, so there’s no way of knowing how muc people would be prepared to pay for it if they had to. Open-source code is also often forked or shared between other projects, further complicating our calculations, and then there’s the fact that some developers get paid for their work by the companies supporting open-source projects (such as Clouder or Hortonworks’ employees), while others do it for free.

But that hasn’t stopped the Linux Foundation from attempting to work it out anyway. In its report, the foundation used what’s called the SLOCCount Model, which was created by David A. Wheeler in 2002 to try and put a figure on the dollar value of a Linux operating system. The model works by evaluating the total number of lines of code in a specific project.

As well as using the SLOCCount Model, the Linux Foundation also tried to factor in the number of “person-hours” that it took to write the code, plus the costs of development.

Crunching all of these numbers together, the Linux Foundation says the total value of its Collaborative Projects comes to $5 billion. Those who wish to review the calculations can do so by downloading a copy of the report from the foundation’s website.

“Over the last few years every major technology category has been taken over by open source and so much opinion has been shared about the proliferation of open source projects, but not about the value,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of developer programs and CMO at Linux Foundation, and co-author of the report. “As the model for building the world’s most important technologies have evolved from the past’s build vs. buy dichotomy, it is important to understand the economic value of this development model. We hope our new paper can help contribute to that understanding.”

The report took into consideration the following Collaborative Projects: The AllSeen Alliance, Automotive Grade Linux, Cloud Foundry Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Code Aurora Forum, Core Infrastructure Initiative, Dronecode, IO Visor, IoTivity, Kinetic Open Storage Project, Let’s Encrypt, Node.js Foundation, Open Container Project, Open Mainframe Project, OPNFV, Open Virtualization Alliance, OpenDaylight, openMAMA, R Consortium, Tizen, Xen Project and Yocto Project.

We should note that not all Collaborative Projects were included in the report, due to some only having joined recently, such as the Open Data Platform initiative.

“When people have the tools and connections to collaborate on a massive scale, any problem can be solved,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at Linux Foundation. “We believe only the Distributed Genius of thousands of people working as one can solve the most challenging problems of our time. Collaboration is today’s competitive advantage.”

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