I think that with a community like this, there's a tremendous opportunity for exploitation. I mean, you've got thousands of technically capable people and even though we're not all experienced .net developers, you've still got a much better audience than your average shop. Plus the fact that there's a huge attraction for doing something so visible besides all the other job perks. I'm sure you've already reasoned that you could get away with this for far less than normal if you wanted.
You could even do something where you pick 20-30 (and the number could float from time to time). Release the source to only those and treat it like a very controlled open source project. For a little extra management effort, you'd get your coding for free. How many devs do you have working for you right now?
A little more on the fanciful side, if you could figure out a way to turn 1000s of unreliable home pcs on consumer internet connections into a grid providing a reliable database, cruncher and network presence, you could get all your infrastructure for free. Think about it: how many of us would be happy to download a little seti-like program and sacrifice a gb or two, some processor time and network bandwidth to be able to say that we help run the anandtech forums! (Alright, that was *really* fanciful. Maybe 20 years down the road of computer science.)