>> The cost of Linux kernel development alone has been estimated at a few $B (https://dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html), current figure is probably over tens of billions.

I followed your link, but it doesn't seem to bear out upur assertion. The two numbers mentioned in the article are 176 mil and 612 mil. Mind you those weren't an estimate of cost, but rather an estimate to replace. Article is dated 2004, with an update in 2011.

Using the lines-of-code estimation it crossed a billion in 2010 - again to replace. That has no relation to what it did actually cost.

Getting from there to "tens of billions" seems a stretch. Assuming a bottom value in your estimate of 20 billion, and assuming a developer costs a million a year, that's 20 000 man-years of effort. Which implies something like 2000 people (very well paid people) working continuously for the last decade.

Which seems, well, unlikely.

> The two numbers mentioned in the article are 176 mil and 612 mil.

Those two numbers are from the intro. The postscript and the updates at the end mention $1.4b and $3b respectively.

The real cost is probably impossible to calculate, but that order of magnitude is a reasonable estimate IMHO, and absolutely comparable, or even larger, than compute costs for SOTA LLMs

There are around 5000 active kernel devs, they are generally highly skilled and therefore highly paid, and they've been working for a lot longer than 10 years.

So doesn't seem that unlikely based on your estimates.

Highly paid like a million a year? Is that a thing?

Linux kernel has been in development since the nineties, not just for the last ten years. Also 5000 contributors is a lot more than 2000 from gp's comment.

Let's ignore the years before dotcom boom since the dev community was probably much smaller, and assume an average of 3500 contributors since.

That's 25 years * 3500 contributors on average * 200k salary (total employee cost, not take home) = $17.5b

Napkin math, but order of magnitude checks out.