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:Put on some fresh pants already

[MightyMartian]

I'd say having a university programming project become one of the biggest operating systems in history, and with the vast number of contributors and collaborators, all for a project that you can freely download, yeah, that's a pretty impressive badge of honor.

If Linus died tomorrow, he'd be viewed as one of the pantheon of great computer innovators, not so much because he produced anything in and of itself unique, but rather because he transformed the *nix ecosystem, and lead to greater penetration than I suspect Unix's original creators could ever have imagined.