I just checked in again at Ohloh, a site which gathers, analyses and presents information about various open source projects on the web. Dries blogged about this a few months ago in his post on CMS codebase comparisons.

Something that seems to be new at Ohloh since my last visit is a box that presents an estimate of the cost of a given project's codebase (using the basic COCOMO model of software costing).

According to Ohloh, Drupal Core is worth approx. $320,000, while contributions would cost $27 Million dollars to rewrite.

Interesting. Ohloh stats for Drupal Core are skewed by the fact that Ohloh gathers stats based soley on CVS HEAD, thereby missing the work done maintaining the various branches. Even correcting for this, the figure for core seems quite low while the figure for contrib is maybe a bit high.

Ohloh seems to be several months behind in tracking the Drupal Contributions repository. It seems that it's just too big. I'm hoping that they will sort this out - perhaps we could offer to help with this by offloading some of the effort to download code and compile statistics.