The Linux Foundation Estimates the Total Costs of Collaborative Projects to $5 Billion

While I don't criticize the Linux Foundation at all, I sense (perhaps wrongly, I would prefer), a cultural claim of ownership over IT in general. IT is no doubt quite young, perhaps a little more than a century since Ada Lovelace. It sits like anything else over all human accomplishments throughout history. Wikipedia shows the history of time, mathematics, the zero (half of IT), writing, the wheel and so on, go as far back as millenniums. So I can't escape the question : what is the cost of history, on which IT is just bulging ?

Bernard de Chartres in 1159 wrote:If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

You make an important point, nmset. The true cost of any modern development is really the sum of all prior advances on which it is based.

We could apply this principle to show the inequity in the way we structure our patent systems. Notice that a company need only document a tiny advance and then claim credit (and profit) from its use, completely disregarding the prior advances on which the patent is based.

do you mean because they talk about the value of open source in general but then only measure the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects? or worse, would the projects include copies of projects from non-Linux-Foundation members? like many projects in say Red Hat Linux?

while important accomplishments do go back millenia, the number of these accomplishments has increased by a few magnitudes within the last 200 years. so to say that IT is just bulging the accomplishments of history i would think is an understatement.

greetings, eMBee.