every time i use Blender i am deeply impressed about how one can create such a complex software. Knowing about the difficulties working with large projects in international teams, it seems to me that it should actually be impossible to create a software like Blender at all.
Just for personal interest, it it possible to say how many lines of codes Blender has? As reference, lets take the latest Build 2.79 with all its addons and everything that is in the zip file i can download from Blender.org.
And along with that, is there a chance to know how many working hours are used? This is of course a tricky question, as 2.79 did not start on a green field out of nothing.
You can get a lot of answers about Blender (and a bunch of other open source projects) over at OpenHub. Based on the data there, it’s about 1.8 million lines of code (not including comments and whitespace).
As for “working hours”… the Cost Estimate page gauges it at about 531 person-years (that is… if you had one developer working regular business hours, it would take that dev 531 years to get Blender where it is right now).
So at the average US programmer salary that would be 35.147952 million US$
or in Germany, based on average German programmer salary: 24.586893 million €