What doesn't make sense in my mind is why Theymos and Bitcointalk want to pay $1,500,000 for a forum software that they are going to publish as an open source code for others to use. That's ridiculous! If you're paying millions of dollars to have a piece of software built, you sure as hell don't give it away for free! At least IMO.

To put things into perspective, Lithium software, which is the software used at most big company "support" forums, like answers.ea.com, Skype Support forums etc, was estimated to have a total cost of $2,300,000 to develop. This is slightly over 50% more than the new Bitcointalk forum software, however, Lithium has almost unlimited restrictions in terms of features, and they lease this software to companies from anywhere between $2,000-$20,000 per month.

Crazy, huh?