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

Thanks to the wodner that is the GPL...

[Anonymous Coward]

... in a manner of speaking, shouldn't it be everyone who has ever worked on any linxu distro ever?

Re:Users vs Developers vs Admins

[GoofyBoy]

>I wonder if Bill Gates actually dares to read sources like Slashdot , Newsforge, and so forth. If he knew what people "really" thought

Um... slashdot, newsforge don't represent what the people "really" think. Its just a small subset of people and the people who posts comments are an even smaller subset of that.

Microsoft should be more embarassed

[realnowhereman]

If (and that's a huge if) Microsoft were right that it's only a few hundred people working on Linux / distribution / favourite app of your choice, then they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Linux is serious competition to Windows in every space. They are having their lunch eaten for them.

If they want to say that there multi-thousand employee empire is being kicked about by a few geeks with spare time at the weekend, then who are we to argue?

There goes my Karma. :-(

[LePrince]

I'm sorry, this'll sound like a troll, or flamebait, but it is not...

My question is : WHO CARES ? I mean, what the hell, why would I want to know how many people were involved in the fabrication of my fridge ?

As I said this is not intended as a flame, but I fail to see the interest.

Re:There goes my Karma. :-(

[Alpha27]

I agree with the parent. To me, it's not about the number of people involved, or how talented they may be, it's about whether the product works, and if it works well.

I don't go and buy a product based on the number of people. For example, I've purchased a game recently, that I found out was developed by a single person. That game gave me the same amount of enjoyment that a game developed by 20+ developers.

Does it mean he is 20x the developer? No.
Does it mean the 20+ developers suck? No.

As for the main comment by the MS person about those who contribute to the kernel, so what if it's 100 or so developers, with a handful or more doing the major contributions. The other developers who may not do "major contributions" are making other contributions to the kernel. Writing improved code, remove security issues, commenting it to make it better for others, testing the code to ensure it works on their system, and on and on.

To me, it sounds more like the MS person is just trying to state some facts to the people who have migrated away from MS products in an attempt to reclaim them. By any FUD necessary, would seem to be MS's motto of the day.

Re:There goes my Karma. :-(

[dubl-u]

My question is : WHO CARES ? I mean, what the hell, why would I want to know how many people were involved in the fabrication of my fridge ?

I care.

I care about the people who have contributed to the open source projects I use because they have given me a fabulous gift, because they're doing something good for the world. They rule.

I only wish more of them lived in my neighborhood, so I could buy 'em a beer. Any of you open-source developers who live near San Francisco's Zeitgeist, drop me a line and I'll pour you a glass of Racer 5.

there can't be only one

[ajrs]

Patrick is my man too. But you need to count all of the people who wrote the software and other files that Patrick packages.

And in the case of Slackware, you also need to count the people that maintain Patrick. :)

How do you count?

[davidwr]

It's nearly impossible to "count" everyone.

If I'm at a trade show and have a conversation with you and you give me insight on how to solve a difficult problem, that makes you a contributor. It's unlikely this will ever be documented though.

A more useful number is:
"For each project or sub-project, how many people contributed 99% of the effort."

This removes from the count most of the one-off contributions, one-line kernel patches by people who never contribute again, people who tested a prerelease project once and made one status report, etc. etc. Granted, these are very important people, but getting a precise headcount is harder than counting tsunami victims, in part because the numbers are of similar size.

Another useful number is "how many people have contributed LATELY," for example, in the last two years. You can attempt to count 100% of the people, but that may not be realistic.

Just an off-the-cuff guess says that if you look back 24 months and count the "99%" contributors for each new or non-trivially-changed system and subsystem, the number will be in the thousands or very low tens of thousands. This is just a guess based on code size; I have no real data to back this up.