Drive-By Contributors to the Linux Kernel

eldavojohn writes "There's an interesting post over at the Kernel Trap that focuses on a man's attempt to find out how many one-time contributors Linux averages per release. Although imperfect due to some obvious unavoidable flaws, he got a few dirty numbers of 'never seen from agains' in the commits from patches 2.6.11 through 2.6.25 and the numbers are: {63, 148, 128, 92, 96, 122, 137, 140, 135, 95, 136, 153, 179, 179, 304}. This makes sense as another reader, Greg KH, pointed out that the distribution curve is tilted towards one-hit contributions, 'the distribution of all of our users are: 50% only contributed 1 patch; 25% contributed 2; 12% contributed 3; 6% contributed 4 and so on ...'"

Comments

Re:Suggestions for evil?

[Rycross]

I'm pretty sure submitted code is reviewed, so you'd have to be pretty clever.

It has been tried before. In this case, someone attempted to use the common C programming mistake of using the assignment operator instead of the comparison operator to backdoor the kernel.

Re:Not the way to do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't confuse OpenSSH and OpenSSL. Especially the OpenSSL from Debian.