Some days ago, a guy named Merkey offered to kernel developers $50000 if they agreed to "sell" him Linux Kernel and change the license (BSD-like instead of GPL). The answers to this lunacy succeeded. Some spoke about its imposibility (it's almost impossible to obtain the authorisation of all copyright holders). The majority of developers, are simply disagreeing with this license change (because Merkey appears to be nearly to SCO and changing to BSD may, in the future, make Linux kernel not free). However, the most funny response came from Ingo Molnar. Estimating the cost of development as David A. Wheeler done with Redhat entire distribution, using directly the SLOCcount tool, Linux Kernel must cost about $176 Million. However, since studying the Kernel can be more accurate than a entire distribution, with Intermediate COCOMO model, David A. Wheeler has published last week another funny (and interesting) estimation: $612 Million.
