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

Not all make the docs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

SourceForge claims 95k projects and 1M members

[DanielJH]

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.