Compass Designs

One of the most fascinating asepcts of being involved in an Open Source project is the amazing level of work done by a world wide community of volunteers. I recall a few months ago discussing this with a client. He maintained that developers working on a commercial CMS were much more dedicated than those working on Open Source projects, that they were more "professional". My reply was quite simple.

"Who strikes you as more dedicated, those that work for $55,000 a year on something or those that do it for free"

The amount of time that open source developers easily approaches those working full time jobs. Not just Joomla, but any of the many open source projects around. He didn't have much of an answer to that.

I came across an interesting site that validated my point, www.ohloh.net. It indexes open source code repositories and calculates various metrics for them. The most popular projects are listed at www.ohloh.net/project/list.

Going to the Joomla project was fascinating , based on the current codebase, Ohloh estimates:

• Codebase: 127,030 LOC
• Effort (est.): 32 Man Years
• Avg. Salary: $55,000/year
• Total: $1,740,767

If you had wanted to pay for the development of Joomla, you would have had to pay over 1.5 million. What's even more interesting is that the code base was built on Mambo. If you check that project out, you will see the same developer names and so have to add their total too. (On an interesting side not you can see a huge amount of coding activity as the Joomla team work on 1.5, the Mambo developer activity graph is /crickets)

I guess I should have a point to this post. Maybe it should be donate to Joomla, you are getting alot for you money.