Measuring Lenny: the size of Debian 5.0 ¤
J.V hua Jos, Gregório Robles, F. Rivas · 2009
The Debian GNU/Linux operating system is one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, not only among end users but also as a basis for other distributions and embedded systems. Besides being popular, it is also one of the largest software compilations and thus a good starting point to analyze the current state of libre (free, open source) software. This work is a quantitative study about the new Debian GNU/Linux release (5.0, codenamed lenny), which was officially released February 14th, 2009. We have measured the size of Debian in lines of code (which is close to 324 million source lines of code), what programming languages have been used to write that code, and the size of the packages included in the distribution. We have also applied a ‘classical’ and well-known cost estimation methods which gives an idea of how much it would suppose to create something as big as Debian from scratch. We estimate that cost to be near 6,100 million Euros.