Donald Townsend. CC BY-NC-SA
A recently released study conducted by the Linux Foundation place the value of the Linux Kernel at around 1.4 billion US dollars (~1.1 billion €) and the value of a the full Fedora 9 distrbution at just above 10 billion US dollars (~7.85 billion €).
The companies and individuals who work on Linux-related projects and build this value proft by sharing the development burden with their peers (and sometimes competitors.) Increasingly it’s becoming clear that shouldering this research and development burden individually, as Microsoft has done, is an expensive approach to building software. While monopoly position in the past has allowed them to fund this massive development, we believe that in the future competition from collaborative forces will make such an isolated position untenable.