We talked on occasion how hard it is to value the hard work and ingenuity invested in any open source development, but now a study has appeared allows us to get an idea of ​​what might actually Open Source development cost of the entity in a distribution like Debian.

is what has made the Open Source developer and consultant James Bromberger, a contributor to the Debian project and has used the program SLOCCount to try to assess what would be the cost future Debian 7 ‘Wheezy’ if you have to be programmed from scratch and get to what will come when it launches in a few months.

analysis was clear: Debian 7, that will contain over 17,000 different software components, development would cost of 14,400 million euros (19,000 million) considering that the average salary of a developer is $ 72,533 (unrealistic salaries in Spain, for example) using data from salary.com and payscale.com. Only the kernel, as already pointed out for months, cost of around one million euros.

7 contain some 419 million lines of code written in 31 different languages ​​, and even a mere curiosity, this data makes clear the vast amount of developer resources that have helped produce a distribution like Debian, but the conclusion is similar to many other Linux distros, and any Open Source development.