Re: How to evaluate the cost of a source code

From: David (FlyLikeAnEagle_at_United.Com)
Date: 08/29/04 

Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 21:11:54 GMT

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 16:43:28 UTC, Thore Karlsen [MVP DX] <sid@6581.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 12:39:39 -0400, "Jaime Stuardo"
> <jstuardo@manquehue.net> wrote:
>
> >Hi all..
> >
> >I have developed an application in Visual C++ 6.0. My customer requested me
> >to sell him the source code, so he will become the owner of all the rights.
> >
> >How can I evaluate how much the source code is? how to determine its price?
> >what variables do I have to considere in evaluating it? This app is an EXE
> >and 5 DLL's. Has anyone here sold the source code too?
>
> Sloccount, available from http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/, will tell
> you how many actual lines of code your product is, as well as how long
> the average programmer would take to do it, and how much it would cost
> on average to develop it. That should give you some basis for pricing.

  Please don't use, or recommend the use of, a product that may help you
estimate a given productivity value. Your personal investment in the
code you developed is worth far more than the time that you put into
developing it. To say that another programmer would have taken X hours
to develop such a product your $Y is a useless measure.

  First, consider what your product may be worth to the customer.
What will and could they use it for? How much would that be worth to them?
What rights are you willing to extend or give up by providing the source
code? That is also worth something to them. Also, if you had provided
some of the ideas in your code, they might be part of any derivative
work for the customer. Thus, they could resell or resuse the product
at a sustantial advantage that you may not have thought of. This is just
a bit of what you might want to consider.

  David

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