Beneficial use of LOC (Lines of Code) metric ;-)
This is just a humorous story about how metrics can be sometimes (incidentally?) used even for programmer’s benefit. A number of years ago (before I joined Microsoft) I worked together with a programmer who had developed a piece of financial software and one financial institution wished to purchase full rights for this specific application. They wanted to be able to do whatever they wished with the source code and because of some reasons the programmer who wrote the code was to receive the noticeable percentage from the profit coming out of this deal.
At some point in the process there was a discussion about how to determine the price for the full rights to the source code? One high-level participant proposed that we should just count the lines of the source code and multiple them by some specific amount of money. His logic was simple: the more there is code, the more it should cost. AFAIK there were some people who agreed with him. Of course people discussing this weren’t programmers ;-)
I don’t know how the deal finally ended, I wasn’t privy to this information, but I would assume that if LOC was the major factor in this deal then the programmer who owned the code would have spent his entire time adding comments to the source code and changing the bracing style ;-)