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?"