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.
Why not? Bitcoin is centered around open source software. Should satoshi have charged people to use bitcoin? Not everything has to have capitalistic motives as well, though if theymos wanted to make more money surely he would have planned to charge people to use the software?
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?
I don't know why anyone would pay this much to use forum software. Maybe in the future companies or organizations wont have to pay anything because of open source software like this one. That's the true beauty of it.