Surfing the web, I fund a very interesting site.
Take a look here.
http://www.ohloh.net/projects/64
not expensive at all … comparing to commercial apps. i thought you wanted to estimate blender’s production costs comparing to them, right?
No. I just discovered this site and I reported my little discovery. 
the overestimate all projects
such as the project im working on, they estimate that its worth 600k and its not even 1/2 done
14 million is the annuel cost to commercal 3d app companies because of people switching to Blender.
The estimate doesn’t mean much - it’s just a calculation based on the number of lines of code. MediaWiki and phpBB are only estimated at 1 and 3 million - I’m sure they actually have a much larger market share.
Estimating based on lines of code is a bit troublesome in many ways. It takes more lines to do certain things in some languages compared to other. Also it doesn’t give any implication to how the code is structured. Does it reuse the code well for instance?
Dude, that isn’t how much it’s worth, that’s how much it would COST to pay people to program it at an average salary of 55,000 a year to however many programmers.
that’s about 3.5 million a year to produce.
which basically means that if you divide 14 million by 52 contributors you’d say that each man has earned $269,230.77 in all.
Or basically $68,000 a year so far =)
boy blender is awesome! hehehe
I don’t know if it’s calculating based on lines of code but rather commits over a 5 year period which is then counted up as working time and then linked to an average annual salary of $55,000. I think that salary is a bit high and I would say the average would be nearer $40,000, which brings the estimate down to around $10 million.
Nonetheless, it’s interesting reading and it lets us see not only how much code is in Blender (over 1 million lines now!!) but also who the major contributors are to the code.
The ones I recognise from the list contributing the most code are ton, ascotan, erwin, sirdude, broken, stiv, campbellbarton (ideasman42/cambo I believe), theeth, lukep, jesterking, intrr, letterrip, eeshlo, goofster, sgefant. Why is halley down at 0? I thought he did the transmissivity stuff? Maybe it needs updated.
It’s really nice to see how much people are willing to put into a project and ask nothing in return. Thank you so much to all those people. I know if I had $10,000,000 loose change, you’d be the most deserving of it. People always want to give money to starving Africans but what’ve they ever done for me? Moochers. 
What I’d really be interested in is what these people do for a living and what kind of education they have. It may encourage others to follow the same line.
Still, I’m just thankful that Mr Ton is a generous man.
He could easily turn around, reverse the GPL and say( if he wanted to) that a $50 donation is required for the next version of Blender.
ozo: Ton alone cannot change the license. It takes the permission of all of the contributors to change the license. That’s unlikely to happen.
Blendernation has been bannering a headline about its allegedly successful fund-raising campaign to buy a classroom for needy kids in some poor country. I’m all for these kinds of charities. But in this case I can’t help but ask, “why not first things first?” What about the Blender developers? Why aren’t we willing to raise funds so we could reward Ton and company’s efforts? Without them Blendernation is non-existent or any of those sites that spawned out of these developers’ efforts. You may think that you are rewarding kids, but what about the business side of constructing a classroom? Private building contractors benefited and not a penny for the creators of the source of it all? None, nada, zero, nil.
Just a bunch of journalist bullsh!t…
Reminds me of how almost every week science 2001 I see a new journalist jerkoff, that has just installed Linux for the first time,
And then comes off like some kind of Desktop OS expert, and writes his “OMG, (insert year here) is going to be the year of the linux desktop.”
I prefer to listen to real experts… Journalists are there to sell commercials, and banner adds…
Truth is never in the equation… just how many people they can shock, and sell bullsh!t products too.
Blender being worth anything even close to that is just absurd. (but not impossible)
Look how he made that spiffy piechart on the percentage of sourcecode is from what programming language!!
What the hell dost that have to do with ANYTHING! this guy is obviously a moron.
Piecharts, percentages,Polls=B$!
But that is just my over opinionated, opinion.
hope this story never reaches DIGG.com.
Aaah heck ya, soo true. I still remember those cool computer science magazines with floppy drives of 1TB, machines that could do easely 10ghz, but well we are like 2/3 years later and still nothing which I can buy. There are people who just go nuts on certain topics and make it look awesome, but I’m sure if we sell blender we won’t get 14million dollar and I don’t think it worth that much, althought it would be cool if it was.
I think blender could be easely worth 500.000 since we already bought the source for 100.000 and since that time it has been incredibly improved, maybe 1/2 million is possible as well, but well who wants to sell blender. 
?
p00f: It’s not about how much it’s worth but how much $$$ would be needed if someone was to hire a team of people to write a program like Blender from scratch.
This calculator estimates how much it would cost to hire a team to write this project from scratch. Total $14,195,494
blender’s worth MORE than 14 million
you’re all wrong
Blender is priceless.