Linux Is the Largest Software Development Project On the Planet: Greg K-H (cio.com)

sfcrazy writes: Greg Kroah-Hartmant, the Linux superstar, delivered a keynote at CoreOS Fest where he gave some impressive details on how massive is the Linux project. Kroah-Hartman said the latest release (4.5) made two months ago contains over 21 million lines of code. More impressive than the amount of code, and what truly makes Linux the world's largest software project is the fact that last year around 4,000 developers and at least 440 different companies that contributed to the kernel. Kroah-Hartman said, "It's the largest software development project ever, in the history of computing -- by the number of people using it, developing it, and now using it, and the number of companies involved. It's a huge number of people."

Comments

Re:The greatest software project on Earth

[Junta]

The problem being is that many managers *think* that some magical process can allow shitty programmers to do great work, and then lay off the great programmers to get cheap-o developers because Agile means quality, no matter how bad your workforce is.

Of course this isn't how most of the well-liked software is done, but it's done *all the damn time* in enterprise software land. Leading to a paradox of free and cheap 'consumer' software generally being a *ton* better than equivalent enterprise software packages which generally cost a whole lot more (when equivalents exist).