Black Duck estimates the cost to develop presently available Open Source Software at 387 billion
Open source software (OSS) and collaborative development have grown from being academic pursuits in the early 1980s into a major economic and development force transforming the way software is created today. According to Black Duck research there are over 200,000 OSS projects on the Internet representing more than 4.9 billion lines of available code. They estimate that reproducing this OSS would cost $387 billion and would take 2.1 million people-years of development. In addition, they estimate that 10% of US-based development, representing $22 billion, is redundant and could be offset using OSS, much of which can be reinvested for true innovation. This is in effect would be a potential fiscal stimulus for innovation, larger than many of the programs in the Obama Administration’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus plan. Estimating what OSS code is worth is difficult to answer precisely, but Black Duck have made an estimate using widely accepted methods to get a first-order approximation. In October 2008, the Linux Foundation published their estimate of the value just for for both Fedora 9 ($10.8 B) and the Linux Kernel ($1.4 B) alone.
For additional information on this study by Black Duck click on this link
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