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Number of People Involved in Your Linux Distro?

Posted by Cliff on from the break-out-the-abacus dept.

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?"

6 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Look, I added one of the command-line options to Konsole. Maybe I'm in your list for that, maybe I'm not. (I should be in there for other reasons, but let that slide.) Does it affect McGrath's point in the slightest whether or not you count me for that work? Especially if you use rxvt or eterm?

  2. Not all make the docs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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). I think this would account for another 2 or 3 persons per developer you found.

  3. SourceForge claims 95k projects and 1M members by DanielJH · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Registered Projects: 95,460
    Registered Users: 1,011,412

    While not all projects are included in Linux distributions, they could all claim to be R+D for future inclusion. Lets guess an average of 1 developer per project. (Some projects have more, some developers have more then one project.) That gives us almost 100,000 developers just at SourceForge.

  4. What MS is really saying .... by gus+goose · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My initial reaction to the quote (remember, I am a Linux bigot), is that Microsoft needs thousands more active developers just to maintain the convoluted code, and to fix bugs. The Linux code is that much cleaner, and has fewer requirements for keeping legacy backward-compatible code.

    i.e. Microsoft is burdened by compatibility and legacy issues. Linux shrugs off the bad habits, and moves on.

    The result is that Linux has comparable "active" functionality, but a miniscule amount of "legacy" functionality, and thus there is simply less work to do for the developers. Also, the code is simpler, and, frankly, the intellectual demands on a Linux developer are less.... so, an intelligent linux developer can spend more of their brain cycles conceptualising improvements instead of finding work-arounds.

    I have lots of work experience in environments where logacy code abounds, and I have spent lots of time working on new and emerging systems as well. My experience indicates that most of the issues in legacy systems involves regression, but the baggage-free new tools are unencumbered, and thus have more scope for "fun" enhancements.

    If Linux (and open source in general) were to make commitments to backward compatibility I am sure that the developers would quickly become entangled in maintenance, rather than development.

    Bottom line is that the OP Quote is accurate in the sense that Microsoft has an encumbered product, Linux is free of those restrictions, and is thus leaner (code wie, and developer wise).

    Linus himself is recently quoted as saying that the major push in linux is no longer in the kernel, it is user-space... implying that there is no more real "sexy" stuff to do there.

    Food for thought

    gus

    --
    .. if only.
    1. Re:What MS is really saying .... by chris_mahan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think that if microsoft was making a gun, it would be a bad, all-purpose gun that takes all the types of bullets ever made, misfired once in a while, and you'd have to disassemble and reassemble the fireing mechanism (reboot) once in a while.

      It shoots ok, and you only need that one.

      Unix on the other hand, makes lots of different types of guns, each with a different purpose and different caliber. But the unix guns would each be exceptional, never misfire, and be more accurate, reliable, and cheaper.

      The downside is that you need more, so you need to know all the different types of guns in order to be effective.

      But once you have, you would be much more effective that the windows guy with his windows gun that still misfires.

      Sorry for the bad analogy.

      As far as the sexy stuff: I can tell you there's plenty more to do.

      For example: Please create a distributed, heterogenous, fault-tolerant system that will take data in and out of databases, automatically deploy consumable generators from metadata, and be clusterable, load-balancing, and self-deploying. Also, it should not repy on the jvm, be language-independent, os-independent, and employ network self-discovery for automated scaling. Furthermore, it should support multiple protocols and be able to self-optimize traffic, handle disconnected latency, and have no single point of failure. Also it should implement non-dns communication, have built-in security, encryption, ssl, and man-in-the-middle foiling.
      It needs to be robust enough to run on 50,000,000 computers without using more than 3% of network or cpu, and be simple enough to run on just one.
      Oh, and it needs to be able to handle data primitives (dates, int, etc) as well as files, and unicode.

      Get to work...

      --

      "Piter, too, is dead."

  5. Not sure what your beef really is about by BigLinuxGuy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So there are hundreds of developers working on the Linux kernel? Given the non-monolithic nature of the kernel that's hardly a surprising number. The value add of the Linux kernel is that it forms the basis of an operating system, not a distro. Of course, most folks don't really understand that Linux is the kernel, not a distro.

    How are you defining a contributor in the distro sense? Someone who writes an apt-get GUI for a Debian-based distro (for example)? Someone who tests the installation and operation of the distro? Someone who compiles and publishes the distro?

    If you're counting the authors of the various packages (such as ethereal, ls, vim, etc.) that comprise a distro as "contributors", then your premise is invalid. That sort of fuzzy math only serves to confuse the issue rather than demonstrate any real substance and is easily debunked.

    Is the distro added value that supports a value proposition? No question, but it's a different value proposition than the one offered by the Linux kernel. I'll observe that you'll have a difficult time quantifying the number of "contributors" to a distro given that distros are collections of software packages that were written without a particular distro in mind (for the most part, there are obviously exceptions). Also, creating a distro should not require hundreds of thousands of contributors given the nature of the task.

    But your mileage may vary....