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Calculation of Effort
Hi, Swashbuckler.
There's nothing proprietary here. The calculator uses the Basic COCOMO model, which is a widely-known calculation that is not unique to Ohloh. There's a good explanation of it on (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO). We've chosen coefficient values of a=2.4 and b=1.05, which are pretty standard numbers. The COCOMO model was created 25 years ago, and I think it was intended to estimate very large, bureaucratic projects in an era where developer activity was relatively hard to measure.
On the other hand, the Person Years statistic you see in the Contributors list is actually computed from the source control history by counting up the number of months the developer actually worked on the project. If the source control logs are correct, then the Person Years statistic is highly accurate.
Keep in mind that there's much more expense in commercial development than just the programmer salaries. The COCOMO model is intended to encompass management, design, marketing, testing, documentation, etc. Therefore, the COCOMO numbers will be much higher than expected for casual projects which haven't bothered with managers, design, testing, and documentation. :-)
Robin
I suspect the person years stat will go awry in that lots of projects have code changes that are infrequently committed - ie most patches in Blender involve heavy outside development for 3 to 6 months followed by a 2 to 4 month integration period. From your description it sounds like only the 2-4 month period would be captured.
LetterRip
Yes, that's true. If your project does much of its development work outside of the source control system, then Ohloh will not see that effort.
That's why I'm a growing fan of source control systems like Git and Darcs, which preserve the history of all work done anywhere, even if the developers don't have commit permissions on the master repository. When outside work is eventually merged into the master source code, the entire history of the outside code comes with it.