HACKER Q&A
📣 eimrine

How much is all the free and open source software currently worth in GB?


I believe compiled binaries are not included in this number, but plain text documentation counts


  👤 eva_cananim Accepted Answer ✓
If ten thousand people have a copy of the source code for bash 5.1.4 then do you count that once or ten thousand times?

If you only count each version once then do you only count official releases or do you increase the count by 500MB when someone corrects a one character typo in their copy of the linux kernel source on their laptop hard drive?

How do you count the size of the git repositories that can check out a million different versions but only store the differences?

I think I have some very old CD-ROMs of compressed debian source code, does the compressed or uncompressed size count?