Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely not about the hours taken to write it, but the skill and knowledge required.

How many hours does it take a doctor to remove your appendix? Is that a relevant metric to judge or place a cost on?

You need to read up on how capitalism actually works. It doesn't matter if the thing was written in 30 seconds. The price comes from the perceived value of it.

botnets make that much everyday

Assuming that, you'd think the author of this codebase would have done some sort of calculation on expected daily return from renting a botnet created via this software, and priced it accordingly. There is a calculation similar to what I described to determine what a successful poker bot is worth.

Otherwise it would make more sense to just run it themselves -- although that would of course expose them to [more] legal risk. Reminds me of bitcoin mining -- can you make more money selling ASIC miners or just mining BTC with the ones that you've built?

Probably stolen software that requires work to deploy.