Roy Rubin gave an interesting talk at Mage::Camp on Tuesday where he presented ‘The State of Magento’. The presentation highlighted the effort that Varien have expended in getting Magento to the current version 1.3.1. During his presentation, Roy confirmed that at version 1.2, Magento has over 200,000 lines of code and took an estimated 55 man years to build.

Many may question the amount of code required to develop Magento – particular given the fact that it’s often quoted how Ruby on Rails and Django based applications can do the same or more than PHP/ASP.NET type applications with a fraction of the lines of code. However nobody can question the huge amount of effort that Varien have poured in to an open source platform. Roy did not provide any figures on the cost of developing the application and the community framework around it however on these numbers it’s not unreasonable to think that Varien’s investment is comfortably in to seven figures.

With these kind of figures in mind, it’s not unreasonable to recognise that Varien need to shift their focus to selling and supporting the Enterprise Edition if they are to continue with their amazing contribution to open source.