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?"

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Gentoo Forums

[Apreche]

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If you look at the official developer list there seem to have been about 100+ developers ever. But so many people who aren't developers work on it.

Re:Gentoo Forums

[sbennett]

If you look at the official developer list there seem to have been about 100+ developers ever. But so many people who aren't developers work on it.

Probably a better estimate is the number of user accounts on dev.gentoo.org, which is currently 374. Once you discount system accounts and retired devs, that's still in excess of 300 AFAICT.

Re:Those e-mail addressess.

[rkcallaghan]

I'd venture a higher percentage are than in most other places.

* Developers actually want to be able to be contacted by other developers.

* Spammers don't generally parse source code for email addresses. Not only is the hit count relatively low, but developers almost surely have spam filtering and/or the smarts not to buy v! a5 r(\.

~Rebecca