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Linux Credits File Reanimated
No_Weak_Heart writes "In his in depth paper Evolution of the Linux Credits file, Ilkka Tuomi discusses the challenges of extracting data from open source files, and then uses the extracted data to describe the geographical expansion of the core Linux developer community."
/.'ed already. Any mirrors?
Luxumburg has more per capita changes then any other country?
Finland needs to support its baby and fight back!
--Ignore this thread as first posts are automatically modded down.
Look at this file you insensitive clod. Linus did write the kernel!!!
We could use this to extract the part of the Linux kernel that SCO says they own, and prove them wrong once and for all.
Make sure Tanenbaum, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are listed, otherwise Ken Brown will get upset. Who knows what he will get up to if provoked - he may call all Linux developers thieves, or even worse names!
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Somehow I was imagining a world map with little lights popping up to show how development spread o'er the world over time.
Very cool anyway, but not as eye-candy-ish.
-jrrl.Self Serving Sig: Hosting Comparison
Odd..
I couldnt find SCO in there..
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Sorry, but that's just parsing the credits file and doing some DNS lookups for the IP adresses. This might be considered a fun project on sourceforge but not serious research. You might ask now why I'm bitching about this. But that's really an important issue. Dead tree journals are getting more and more expensive and serious scientists are trying to biuld up a royality-free alternative. When self acclaimed "peer-reviewed" electronic journals like First Monday are publishing such human insterest stuff as "research" then they are harming the reputation of all electronic scientific journals and especially the projects to create a royalty-free peer-reviewed publication chain. And thus they are in fact harming science. Slashdot should in no way encourage such behavior.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I've been on /. for a number of months now, and i have been trying (casually) to figure out what it means when someone says a website has been "/.'ed"
:)
Would someone please let me know, and while you're at it, don't be an insensitive clod (unless its funny)
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Anyone who thinks there's little difference between the way men's and women's brains work should consider this statistic. I don't think that societal expectations, peer pressure, or discrimination can account for the 200-to-1 ratio in this case. It's probably safe to conclude that the kernel-hacker gene resides on the Y chromosome.
Have you read my blog lately?
If the current trend in the "Figure 1: Number of people in the Credits file." graph keeps going then it's simply a matter of time before every inhabitent on this spinning ball called Earth is credited for conributing to the Linux kernel..
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
He says there are no developers from india...IBM has at least a couple on hire over there....
"In July 2002, the Credits file contained information on 418 developers. With two exceptions, all were male "
2 female types listed in the credits file? With contact information? Time to do a little research of my own...
Slashdot sucks
That is virtuoso documentation of the methods used to analyse the documentation of the code credits.
Someone that talented should be writing code.
It could just be that nerdy males with fewer social skills tend to gravitate toward introverted tasks that don't require a lot of personal interaction with others.
Women, by nature, are more social creatures. Sitting alone in a basement at night hacking a kernel isn't necessarily something they can't do (I've met plenty of women who blow me away in science in math), it's something they don't want to do. Hell, I had to ask one of my female friends to help me with some SQL statements for my website. She is a complete SQL expert, and better than any male I know.
Thats a good job to have in the corporate IT world.Just make sure everyone gets credit... and you get paid! :-)
I would say just make sure the guy who pays you gets credit and everything else runs fine.
Lord of the Binges.
At the time, it would have been difficult to predict that Linux would ten years later be considered as a major threat to Microsoft's dominance in operating systems.
major threat..lol
Most programmers from the developed countries (read US, Europe) take the computer/network resources and even their standard of living for granted. Computer prices and network acces in developing countries is still sparse and exorbitant for most people.
Moreover, writing code for a hobby is at the back of the minds of most people, when their foremost worries are basic comforts needed for a comfortable life (read electricity, job, steady income, etc). It is only when a comfortable life is guaranteed, that a person has the luxury/option/motivation to pursue hobbies.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Surreptitious
And
Moronic
Incindiary
Z -- it makes the title look cooler
Diatribe
Against
Torvalds
The people in the CREDITS file are not all the people that work on the kernel. You should look at the Copyright notices in the source code.
E.g. I am not in the CREDITS file (not that I need to be), but I have Copyright notices in over 30 files. I guess there are many more people working on parts of the linux kernel than are noticed in the CREDITS file.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
I am sick of hearing this "lone hacker theory" rubbish. Since anyone who works on the kernel is going to be constantly emailing, newsgrouping, and using IRC/IM there is no reason to label them as unsocialable. Just because you are using a computer to do the socialising doesn't make it count less than an afternoon at the pub with your workmates. If they were sitting in their basements and hacking their own sources and never communicating with other developers then your model might hold up, but it just isn't relevant any more.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I am sick of hearing this "lone hacker theory" rubbish. Since anyone who works on the kernel is going to be constantly emailing, newsgrouping, and using IRC/IM there is no reason to label them as unsocialable.
You think typing text characters into an e-mail or on IRC is the same as actually speaking to somebody in person right in front of you, staring them in the face?
Just because you are using a computer to do the socialising doesn't make it count less than an afternoon at the pub with your workmates.
Socializing on a computer isn't the same as socializing in person. Comparing it to an afternoon at the pub with your workmates his hilaroius. You may as well say you're actually "speaking" to me right now, and it's the same as if we actually ran into each other in person and started debating. Completely different. IM, IRC, and e-mail allow you to communicate with others without actually confronting them face to face.
With all this hullabaloo about outsourcing, did you notice that there are no contributors from India?
During the evolution of Linux, new contributors have been continuously added to the file. In July 2002, the Credits file contained information on 418 developers. With two exceptions, all were male [1].
Obviously Linux Kernal Development suffers from a serious lack of diversity. Time to get more young girls interested in kernal development. Perhaps we could have a "Female Kernal Developer" class required in the 6th grade....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
>I couldnt find SCO in there
They're represented in credits by Linux Torvalds
Didn't microsoft just patent the process they're using to do this?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
nt
Anytime a large number of geeks have free time on their collective hands is good for the Linux kernel. Though, that shouldn't be a suprise to many here...
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
Mods you shouldn't be rating the parent as funny
Because that *is* the truth
Loads of women like knitting, decorating and doing other kind of manual work that requires little to no interaction with other human beings.
i cle/PTO-20030624-000003.asp:
Are you for real? If they knit, they prefer to knight in groups. If they're decorating, they're usually doing it with their friends, including the shopping for items beforehand. They even go to the bathroom in groups. By nature, women are social. You're actually arguing this? Have you even read any scientific research about it?
For starters, there's a small part of the male brain that becomes active when speaking and dealing with language. In females, the entire brain becomes active when they speak. The "father" of sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard University, said that human females tend to be higher than males in empathy, verbal skills, social skills and security-seeking, among other things, while men tend to be higher in independence, dominance, spatial and mathematical skills, rank-related aggression, and other characteristics.
From http://www.psychologytoday.com/htdocs/prod/PTOArt
Women's perceptual skills are oriented to quick--call it intuitive--people reading. Females are gifted at detecting the feelings and thoughts of others, inferring intentions, absorbing contextual clues and responding in emotionally appropriate ways. They empathize. Tuned to others, they more readily see alternate sides of an argument. Such empathy fosters communication and primes females for attachment.
Men focus first on minute detail, and operate most easily with a certain detachment. They construct rules-based analyses of the natural world, inanimate objects and events. In the coinage of Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, Ph.D., they systemize.
Seeing a pattern here? It's not that women can't do what men do and vice versa, it's just that we're more inclined to certain focus areas. Geeks like us are more likely to latch onto introverted tasks. As I said before, I know lots of incredible intellectuals who are female, but they'd rather hang out with friends in person than spend their weekends alone typing dialog to some text names on IRC. These differences in the sexes are what make humanity diverse and wonderful.
Of the 5 core developers of the VAX/VMS V1.0 kernel, 2 were female. Nancy Kronenberg and Cathy Morse if my memory serves me right. Alongside David Cutler, Richard Hustvedt and another Richard that went to Microsoft via Apple (Pink). Oops, maybe 6 developers - Andy Goldstein on the file system.
>I've met plenty of women who blow me away
... oh well...
m
I still do but lately
>nerdy males with fewer social skills
Social skills? What's that? It doesn't mean they exist only in person-to-person communication.
Take a look at:
http://www.psc.uc.edu/sh/SH_Social_Skills.ht
You'll see that by their definition people who live their lives online do have social skills.
Also the page says that "a failure to learn adequate social skills can lead to feelings of isolation, loneliness, rejection, and poor self-esteem."
I think most people involved in open source projects actually feel the opposite because of the sense of joint achievement. And while online I don't see as much greed, discrimination, envy and other bad things that I see daily in my offline life.
From my perspective, online life and most communities are actually healthier than real life that you consider the standard by which you judge others.
So women are never desperate
I'd say that if a women loses her virginity it is more a result of either her own desperation, or simply her own desire to do so
Women can be desperate for emotional attachment (as can men) and will use their body to extort a feigned emotional sentiment from a partner. And some women might just want sex (as men most certinally do). The general attitude has been the men are always the sexual initators and that women are the submissive ones yet this attitude is changing as it obviously is not always the case (though, admitidly, the male libido on average, tends to be higher and more influenced by lust)
Lastly, a vast majority of women are having sex with men. And, while some women are with older guys, most young people date people with in a small deviation of age (just because, these are the peopole they are exposed to through school and work). Therefore, either only a slightly higher percentage of women then men, 20 and below will not be virjins, OR there are a few alpha males devirginising the women populace. I think that the second factor is limited.
QED women are desperate too, and men fail to remain extra-virginal by the time they reach young adulthood.
Oh, and women are more social and physically comfortable around each other. Not giong to get into it now but which gender is prone to going to the washroom in pairs...
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
It says two exceptions, not two women. They're probably aliens, or dogs, or elder gods or something.
If only you had clicked on the little [1], after the sentence would you have realised that your search space can probably be larger.
1. There are six names in the Credits file whose gender could not be verified by searches on the Internet or by asking other persons mentioned in the Credits file. As no information indicated that the persons in question would be female, I have made the assumption that they are males.
The author I guess would be glad if you share the results of your research with him
(Karma be damned; I am no better than an AC anyway)
Consider the following entry :
/dev/null /dev/random
N: Vijaya Chandra
E: v@tachyontech.net
W: http://www.tachyontech.net
D: Stress Tester -
D: Stress Tester -
(You needn't wake up your grep. This entry has been discontinued in the post-0.x kernels)
Tracerouting to tachyontech.net would tell you that I am in the UK, while only our web/pop servers are in england.
'Chandra' can either be a male or a female. But the androgynous 'Vijaya' with the 'a' at the ending would score high towards females.
I would be damnably pi*ed of to find myself considered as a female (unless of course I am thrown into the male-by-default group, which seems to be the case in the article) kernel developer from the UK
So how reliable can the results of such an evaluation be??
(Karma be damned; I am no better than an AC anyway)
How you do keep US prisons clear of natives, because in Canada natives make up something like 70-80% of the prison population!
Oh, you don't have as many natives, because you have black people in there? Why would black people commit crimes? Not very many black people are criminal in Canada. This is clearly an error on your prison system's part in assigning the blame to the wrong people, because all natives steal and all women can't write computer code!
Go read "Black Like Me" before you start stereotyping. The reason female programmers don't contribute is a heady concotion of many social pressures, not the least of which are gender biased people like you.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Anybody know what program was used to make those graphs? They look like Excel, which would be hilariously ironic for analysing the Linux kernel. Of course, a lot of things look like excel...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That should be "in-depth paper" to avoid ambiguity. More on compound words.
=S