ohloh.com is an interesting little website that has spurred some chatter on the Drupal dev mailing list. It claims to "map the open source world" by "collecting objective information on open source projects."
It analyzes the codebase and contributions for a project and spits out some interesting data. A particularly charming feature is that it estimates the number of collective man hours that have gone into a given project, and tallies what it might cost to have such a project developed.
After clicking around a bit, I couldn't help but wonder how Drupal stacked up against that other popular CMS, Joomla(!). All in good fun of course, and the ohloh data should be read with your trusty salt lick on hand.
| metric | Drupal | Joomla |
|---|---|---|
| Lines of Code | 371,314 | 135,623 |
| Time to Code | 98 Man Years | 34 Man Years |
| Cost to Code | $5,364,474 | $1,866,909 |
| Developers | 527 | 24 |
Cost to Code is based on an average salary of $55,000 a year. "Man Years" might better be represented as "Person Years" or "Coder Years" in deference to Webchick ;)
Drupal page at ohloh
Joomla page at ohloh
Something tells me that the results for Plone are a little off. 28 lines of code, 75% of which are a DOS shell script. Total cost? $257. Not too bad, actually, for a 21 line batch file.
The Drupal numbers are inflated; they contain the entire contrib repository. Not sure I would shell out even $10 for some of those modules...