
Originally Posted by
elanthis
My top-of-the-head guess tells me around $20,000 USD.
A moderately competent developer costs about $50/hour. The particularly good ones can and usually do command a good deal more.
I believe the KMS switching work, given the portions that are already implemented, has an absolute minimum one man-month of work to complete (remember, this must include hardware research, actual coding, documentation, and extensive testing): four weeks of full-time development. So that's a low-ball figure of 50*40*4 = $8,000.
If you hire a more qualified dev (like Dave Airlie) who is more likely to expect around $80/hour, and if you assume a more feasible two months of work, then you end up at around 80*40*8 = $25,600.
Unless you're a wealthy philanthroprist, paying for Open Source development is infeasible. There's a reason why just about every single successful Open Source project is heavily backed by a corporate entity, such as Red Hat or Novell or Oracle or AMD or VMWare or so on. Hobbyists very rarely develop quality software, competent developers aren't just floating around looking for short-term contracts, and money don't grow on trees.