I recently came across the program 'sloccount' that attempts to
calculate the time and money that went into writing software.
http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/
If ran on the source code of python 2.5 the results are the following:
Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 689,996
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years = 191.35
Estimated Average Number of Developers = 48.52
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 25,848,213
Please credit this data as "generated using David A. Wheeler's 'SLOCCount'."
I'm wondering if the person-years and estimated average number of
developers numbers are accurate or not - not that it's of any
importance, just wondering. And about the 25 million dollars total
price tag, well, ummmmm :)