The Lurker

Free software isn't cheap

posted by ajf on 2004-10-19 at 10:14 am

So, some crazy guy offered $50,000 for a proprietary Linux licence. Everybody laughs — even if that weren't an absurdly low amount, the task of just finding every single copyright holder, let alone convincing them to agree to the relicensing, is just impossible — and then somebody decides to calculate how much the Linux kernel is actually worth.

And comes up with a development cost of $612 million.