Writing a line and keeping it

… Divide roughly and you get more than eighty dollars per line, every year, for as long as the program exists. In return, in each of the three most recent versions of the program at the time, exactly one error had been found, and across eleven versions there had been seventeen, whereas a commercial program of comparable complexity, by an estimate in the same article, would have had about five thousand. Between eighty dollars a line and a dollar for a million lines lies a difference of almost a hundred million times, and this chapter is about what happens to the world when the cost of something falls that far.