Home Messages Index
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index

Re: Debian Linux Would Have Cost $175 BILLION to Develop Commercially


"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1473870.IuNQcqvKbZ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
__/ [ George Ellison (undercover) ] on Thursday 17 August 2006 04:35 \__

Roy Schestowitz wrote:
SLOCCount Web for Debian Sarge


http://libresoft.dat.escet.urjc.es/debian-counting/sarge/index.php?menu=Statistics

Ummm, you're off by a factor of 1,000 here, if I read it right.

Oops. My mistake. I have corrected the subject line. Sorry about that....

I had assumed that you were doing a "British million" or something along those lines. ;)


   I've got some bad news and some good news.

Bad news: The site specifies that the figure produced is an upper bound on the actual project cost. The site also refers you to the FAQ for more details, but when I clicked, it turned out to be a dead link, so I couldn't see more details there. The site uses the "Basic COCOMO" metric: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_COCOMO Unfortunately, Basic COCOMO is said only to be accurate for three types of projects:

<quote>
* Organic projects - are relatively small, simple software projects in which small teams with good application experience work to a set of less than rigid requirements.
* Semi-detached projects - are intermediate (in size and complexity) software projects in which teams with mixed experience levels must meet a mix of rigid and less than rigid requirements.
* Embedded projects - are software projects that must be developed within a set of tight hardware, software, and operational constraints.
</quote>


I don't think Debian qualifies as a "small" or "intermediate" project, nor as an "embedded" one, so I'm not sure how well this metric applies to the code being measured.

Good news: COCOMO was developed by Barry Boehm during a study of about sixty software projects. What he discovered during this study is that personel motivation overwhelms all other factors. I think this is good advocacy for OSS, as people who work on OSS typically do it out of love, whereas people who develop CSS typically do it for money.

- Oliver


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index