The following question came to my mind: How many lines of code will each software have? Researching by Google I have found some curious data about the number of lines of source code that certain operating systems and programs that we use on a daily basis have.
In a multitude of blog they have seen comparative between one and the other free operating systems or kernels, between one or the other programs, open source alternatives, manuals and tutorials, but never something like this article and it seemed original to share it with you.
You know that Linux distributions have more lines of code? Well, one of the ones with the most lines is Debian, which has about 419 million lines of code (almost 4 times more than others like Red Hat). To give you an idea, Windows XP has about 45 million, FreeBSD less than 9, OpenSolaris almost 10 and Mac OS X about 86. This reflects the vastness of Debian compared to other competitors.
Of that barbarism of lines, more than 15 million belong to the Linux kernel. Kernel version 1.0 contained only 176.250 lines (quite a few compared to 4000 in MS-DOS or the more than 2 million that have the latest Window NT kernels), so the kernel has grown a lot in the last few years. The 2.6, for example, already contained more than half a million and thus the complexity has increased until the latest 3.x versions, which, as we have said, already have more than 15 million.
La office suite OpenOffice can count on about 20 million, while its "sister" LibreOffice was lightened. On the other hand, 3D design and animation programs such as Blender have only 1 million lines of code, despite its extreme complexity. And GIMP, the famous photographic design and image treatment program, may be close to Blender in its latest versions.
Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox They are around 7 million, being a million less than the first browser. To get an idea, other systems such as Gmail can contain slightly less than 0.5 million and video games of the stature of World of Warcraft can reach 5,5 million, which even if it is not free software gives you an idea to compare with the rest of figures.
If you stop to think and start to perform calculations, you can get an idea of how much money the development of these distributions of which I have spoken and because it would sell it to us if it were not free software. That is why we must be grateful that we can have a * nix operating system that in most cases does not cost us a single penny.
Wow, (although right now I am seeing this many years after this post was published), that is why it is so important to thank free software projects; the world would be different without them.
Regarding the last paragraph of the article, which will only have to do with * nix. with free software.
Free software is also for windows operating systems, see free office, gimp, Firefox, blender, etc, etc, etc .. So for that reason it does not show off * nix, nor be better, plain and simple.
People will not switch to linux for this.