Jesus Christ that is 50% over budget!
I seriously hope this dorum is going to be slick or it is a 1.5 Million not well spend.
When I first contacted Slickage, I stated my budget as $1.5 million. They estimated that only $1 million would be necessary. But the requirements changed in various ways, and (as always) various unexpected issues cropped up.
The forum must meet your and almost everyone's expectation then. That's quite a large sum of money.
Do you know exactly how many developers are working on the forum?
I expect that (especially after all this time) most people will be disappointed when the switchover happens because there won't be any
major feature improvements over the current forum. My huge list of requirements will be met, but there's nothing groundbreaking in there. Building something (a little more than) feature-equal to SMF (which has been in development for over 10 years) isn't easy. But the new forum software is much more extensible and secure, so any future enhancements should be much easier to do.
There are 4 full-time programmers working on it, plus some additional outside contractors. You might be surprised by the cost if you've never looked into this sort of thing before, but it's actually pretty standard for a group of this size.
And if they can be trusted 110%?
They could easily build in backdoors of which we would only found out about if things already were to go south.
The code is public.
1.5 million is absolute madness. I bet huge corporations don't even pay that much for their website. Also the slickage twitter had only 75 followers as someone else said. I hope I can trust you guys on this one but a forum for 1.5 million when there are free alternatives is quite large...
Huge corporations pay way more for this sort of thing. This isn't just any website. It's a very large and complicated computer program.
Will that software be used only on bitcointalk.org? Or will it be available for other forums either as open-source or paid licences?
It'll be free and open source. MIT license. (Much of the code is already public on github.)