> Well, sloccount is a bit of fun, and whilst there are all sorts of > problems associating value solely to lines of code, does anyone else > have a better method, or can we only ascertain the value of something > in our society via "the free market"?
Perhaps another way of measuring value is by demand. This is probably far harder to do than lines of code. Since supply and demand is the driving forces behind this free market you can perhaps look at downloads or popularity to measure the value of something. Such comparisions become meaningless even more so than lines of code when you start comparing things that do different tasks. (like a C compilier to a desktop environment.) Not to mention the 'demand' created by massive marketing machines. Then perhaps supply is a good way to measure value. It pretty much has the same problems as demand. You could probably come up with some sort of weighted value that says lines of code + probable man hours involved in making the code + distribution costs = cost of some peice of software. Value is different to cost. I think what debian is worth is actually alot more than 1.9billion, but as to what debian costs if you payed everyone to write it then perhaps lines of code or some other weighted metric is useful. The question is fairly useless itself though. Dave -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
