Well, it has taken me a calendar month, maybe 80 working hours to set up a copy of OpenACS 3.2.
I expect to expend another 200 hours labor to learn TCL, learn PostGres, configure a chroot jail, and grok the data structure.
Direct costs associated with my set up are approx $900 for server, $100 for a UPS, $50 for Philip and Alex's Web Guide book.
Costs not incurred yet are the charges for a high bandwidth internet connection.
Another cost not expressed here is the hours to find sponsors and clients for my particular non-profit human service vision.
So, using Lee's Law of Three-to-Five [ Any really new software project really costs Three to Five times as much as you thought It would ] and $25 /hr for labor...
An OpenACS installation with any significant measure of customization is easy to price out at $8500 (during the honeymoon phase of the project) and actually cost $25,500 to $42,500.
Most of the cost is "labor" and clearly a learning curve must exist and the learning curve must be very steep, because this is software and there are many discrete systems within the OpenACS concept.
Personally I am a wussy about this stuff and I'd love a series of RPM files to make setting up OpenACS a snap, and bye and bye maybe that will happen.
And I post this estimate with affection and apologies to the wonderful people working to make OpenACS happen. I could be wrong by a factor of 3x-to-5x either up or down. Clearly, if I had more experience in TCL, Postgres, SQL or AOLServer the hours would be less.
