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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?"
I haven't contibuted at all, if that helps with your calculations.
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... in a manner of speaking, shouldn't it be everyone who has ever worked on any linxu distro ever?
1.
and what method did you use to come up with that number?
Just created a new fork for a distro that will REALLY succeed on the desktop this time, and haven't told anyone else about it until right now.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
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If you look at the official developer list there seem to have been about 100+ developers ever. But so many people who aren't developers work on it.
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>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.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
And don't forget :
57.3 % of all numbers are meaningless. They are just made up.
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?
Carpe Daemon
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
If we are going to count all people who help open source developers, why stop with help channels? Shouldn't we also include the fine people at AMD and Intel who provide the computers that we use? Tyan for making my motherboard, Samsung for making my monitor, Logitech for making my mouse, and gasp even Microsoft who made my ergonomic keyboard. Then there are the book authors (you didn't think you could accomplish anything without them, did you?) like Knuth, Fowler, Abrash, Carmack, and many others.
Then you need to include the contractors who built your house (try coding on the sidewalk!), the electricians who ran the power wiring through the walls (computers don't run on air), the HVAC technicians that installed your heating furnace (hard to code when you're shivering). Also, don't forget to include your employer, since without him you'd have no money to buy the house in which you live, the computer on which you work, or the food to keep you alive. Speaking of food, don't forget to include farmers and supermarkets, without whom you'd not be able to write a single line of code due to being dead.
Gosh, that pretty much includes everybody in the world! I'm so glad that OpenSource development is so darn popular.
I only skimmed the article but it's funny to see Linux kiddies criticizing a Microsoft guy for making true statements that would serve to clarify the distinction between "linux the kernel" and "linux the distribution".
Bad Microsoft guy! Start up the FUD again, this truth thing is horrible! Bad bad!
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
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.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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....
I'd venture a higher percentage are than in most other places.
* Developers actually want to be able to be contacted by other developers.
* Spammers don't generally parse source code for email addresses. Not only is the hit count relatively low, but developers almost surely have spam filtering and/or the smarts not to buy v! a5 r(\.
~Rebecca