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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?"
...you need to count. There are tons of people developing apps for Linux that aren't open. My company has developed medical software for 20+ years in UNIX (with Linux being the focus over the last 6?). And we're hardly alone.
And what about all the known commercial developers? ID Software, driver development (nVidia/ATI), etc.?
...if I wanted to read garbage like that, I'd go to \.