I found a small program called "sloccount". It estimates the value of a program using the number of lines of code. Here's the output for Sword :
------------- Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): cpp: 46447 (73.96%) ansic: 13318 (21.21%) tcl: 1602 (2.55%) sh: 792 (1.26%) perl: 547 (0.87%) sed: 93 (0.15%) Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 62,799 Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 15.45 (185.38) (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05)) Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 1.52 (18.19) (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38)) Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule) = 10.19 Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 2,086,854 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40). Please credit this data as "generated using 'SLOCCount' by David A. Wheeler." ------------- Many many thanks to Troy, he did the major part of Sword! Troy spent over 2 million dollars for Sword. I hope we'll get another two million... ;) Joachim
