The Linux Foundation published this excellent article:  Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution

Some very interesting stats :

Linux is the most popular open source operating system today, didn’t you know that already?

Total development cost of a Linux distribution in 2002: $1.2 billion

Cost to build Fedora 9 in 2008: $10.8 billion

Cost of developing the Linux kernel: $1.4 billion

Total: 3200 kernel developers representing 200 companies.

Active for every release: 1,000 kernel developers from over 100 companies.

Linux ecosystem: $25 billion

(which means if you are in the Linux business, you have a huge market already)

Red Hat Linux 7.1 (2002): 30 Million lines of code.

Fedora Linux 9 (2008):  204 million lines of code.

How to estimate the cost of development:

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) 204,500,946
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months)
(Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))		 59389.53 (712674.36)
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)
(Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))		 24.64 (295.68)
Total Estimated Cost to Develop
(average salary = $75,662.08/year, overhead = 2.40).		 $10,784,484,309

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