Number of People Involved in Your Linux Distro?

MerlinTheGreen asks: "I read a recent interview with Microsoft's Nick McGrath in which he claimed, 'There a myth in the market that there are hundreds of thousands of people writing code for the Linux kernel. This is not the case; the number is hundreds, not thousands.' This annoyed me a little as it perpetuates the idea it is Linux rather than the distribution that, in Microsoft-speak, would represent the value proposition. Recognizing that it's the distro that really counts, I wondered how many people were involved in mine. My answer is that, for FC3, I found 16921 unique e-mail address just by running a simple script over /usr/share/doc. What other estimates are there for the number of people who are involved in your distribution, and what method did you use to come up with that number?"

Comments

You can count me out

[titaniam]

I haven't contibuted at all, if that helps with your calculations.

These emails

[yogikoudou]

D'you sell'em ? Send proposal to buying@penispillz.com

hmm

[geoffspear]

What other estimates are there for the number of people who are involved in your distribution,

1.

and what method did you use to come up with that number?

Just created a new fork for a distro that will REALLY succeed on the desktop this time, and haven't told anyone else about it until right now.

statistics.

[leuk_he]

And don't forget :
57.3 % of all numbers are meaningless. They are just made up.

Support people are not developers

[Chemisor]

> There are many people who seriously help in
> opensource development yet are too low profile to
> show up in the docs or help feed information to
> the actual developers (like for example the
> people in help channels)

If we are going to count all people who help open source developers, why stop with help channels? Shouldn't we also include the fine people at AMD and Intel who provide the computers that we use? Tyan for making my motherboard, Samsung for making my monitor, Logitech for making my mouse, and gasp even Microsoft who made my ergonomic keyboard. Then there are the book authors (you didn't think you could accomplish anything without them, did you?) like Knuth, Fowler, Abrash, Carmack, and many others.

Then you need to include the contractors who built your house (try coding on the sidewalk!), the electricians who ran the power wiring through the walls (computers don't run on air), the HVAC technicians that installed your heating furnace (hard to code when you're shivering). Also, don't forget to include your employer, since without him you'd have no money to buy the house in which you live, the computer on which you work, or the food to keep you alive. Speaking of food, don't forget to include farmers and supermarkets, without whom you'd not be able to write a single line of code due to being dead.

Gosh, that pretty much includes everybody in the world! I'm so glad that OpenSource development is so darn popular.

funny thing

[justins]

I only skimmed the article but it's funny to see Linux kiddies criticizing a Microsoft guy for making true statements that would serve to clarify the distinction between "linux the kernel" and "linux the distribution".

Bad Microsoft guy! Start up the FUD again, this truth thing is horrible! Bad bad!