Re: Cost of Octave

[Paul Kienzle]

On Jul 21, 2006, at 11:29 AM, David Bateman wrote:

> John W. Eaton wrote:
>
> > On 21-Jul-2006, Javier Arantegui wrote:
> >
> > | Hello,
> > |
> > | If we wanted to write Octave, how much would it cost us? According 
> > to
> > | http://www.ohloh.net, we would need $700,516 and 13 man years:
> > |
> > | http://www.ohloh.net/opensource/software/octave
> > |
> > | That's a lot of money and effort!
> > |
> > | To put the data in perspective, the estimated cost of Maxima is 
> > $1,089,624 and
> > | the cost of Gnuplot is $1,170,857:
> > |
> > | http://www.ohloh.net/compare/detail?projects=maxima+gnuplot+octave
> >
> > I think these numbers are quite low.
> >
> > jwe
> John, the octave number only includes octave-forge and doesn't even
> include the m-files of octave-forge as far as I can see. So I expect 
> the
> real octave number is probably almost an order of magnitude higher if
> octave and octave-forge are included..

Good guess.  I get about 500k LOC in m,c,c++ and h files.

LOC             forge   octave
m                75k     82k
h                 8k     49k
c                 6k      8k
c++              52k    199k
----    ----    ----
total   140k    340k

55k/year is too low for salary.  By the time you include
overhead you will need something closer to $100k/year.

500kLOC / (4 kLOC / year) * 100 k$/year = 12.5 M$

Note that I'm ignoring the 115k lines of fortran in libcruft
since someone else developed it.

There is an extra 20k or so to each project for shell scripts,
perl, Makefiles, etc. but there is also some autogenerated
stuff in the tree so I'll pretend it cancels.

- Paul