Number of People Involved in Your Linux Distro? 76
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?"
You can count me out (Score:4, Funny)
One (Score:2)
there can't be only one (Score:3, Insightful)
And in the case of Slackware, you also need to count the people that maintain Patrick.
He he .... (Score:2)
Well, not to be a grammar Nazi, but the difference between "the one I bitch to" and "the one I bitch too" is just too damned funny.
Re:One (Score:1)
These emails (Score:2, Funny)
Who cares? (Score:1, Interesting)
My favorite distribution (Score:2)
> distribution that would represent the value proposition.
Well then, if Linux doesn't really count, then my favorite distribution is FreeBSD!
Thanks to the wodner that is the GPL... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thanks to the wodner that is the GPL... (Score:2)
And if it has, there should be an email in the CREDITS file in
hmm (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Jokes are less funny when explained.
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Pretty much. The point is to compare the number of people working on Windows to the number working on Linux.
Not all make the docs (Score:3, Interesting)
Support people are not developers (Score:3, Funny)
> 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 m
Gentoo Forums (Score:3, Informative)
We have 76292 registered users
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.
Re:Gentoo Forums (Score:2)
One load of BS deserves another (Score:2)
Its hard to tell what the hell the article was talking about. One minute its kernel developers, next it's developers of all open source software.
Re:Gentoo Forums (Score:2)
Anyway, having only a few people with that level of kernel expertise is just fine, as long as they are able to spend their time on development and not QA. The comparison probably gets a lot more interesting at that level. How big is MS' Windows QA department? If we compare the numbers of people subm
Re:Gentoo Forums (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Probably a better estimate is the number of user accounts on dev.gentoo.org, which is currently 374. Once you discount system accounts and retired devs, that's still in excess of 300 AFAICT.
Users vs Developers vs Admins (Score:1)
Re:Users vs Developers vs Admins (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Users vs Developers vs Admins (Score:1)
Re:Users vs Developers vs Admins (Score:1)
Of course, opnions are like assholes, every human being on the face of this planet has one and is entitled to it. So, Brother, I shall fight for your right to have opinions. (No, I was going to say babies, but I doubt his name is Stan).
Re:Users vs Developers vs Admins (Score:2)
statistics. (Score:2, Funny)
57.3 % of all numbers are meaningless. They are just made up.
Re:statistics. (Score:1)
Microsoft should be more embarassed (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Microsoft should be more embarassed (Score:1)
There goes my Karma. :-( (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:There goes my Karma. :-( (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't go and buy a product based on the number of people. For example, I've purchased a game recently, that I found out was developed by a single person. That game gave me the same amount of enjoyment that a game developed by 20+ developers.
Does it mean he is 20x the developer? No.
Does it mean the 20+ developers suck? No.
As for the main comment by the MS person about those who contribute to the kernel, so what if it's 100 or so developers, with a handful or more doing the major contributions. The other developers who may not do "major contributions" are making other contributions to the kernel. Writing improved code, remove security issues, commenting it to make it better for others, testing the code to ensure it works on their system, and on and on.
To me, it sounds more like the MS person is just trying to state some facts to the people who have migrated away from MS products in an attempt to reclaim them. By any FUD necessary, would seem to be MS's motto of the day.
Re:There goes my Karma. :-( (Score:2)
Of course, the number of people who have examined the code isn't equivalent to the number of people who have contributed to the code, but the latter isn't wholly irrelevant either.
Re:There goes my Karma. :-( (Score:2)
And the number of people listed in MAINTAINERS [bkbits.net] isn't equivalent to the number of people who contributed code either. If the MS shill had given some source for his data, we could probably make better speculations.
It would be very hard to count even by looking at the changelog. Most of the IBM patches for example are submitted by a couple of people, but were developed by other peop
Re:There goes my Karma. :-( (Score:2)
Stupid typos (Score:2)
Re:There goes my Karma. :-( (Score:2, Insightful)
I care.
I care about the people who have contributed to the open source projects I use because they have given me a fabulous gift, because they're doing something good for the world. They rule.
I only wish more of them lived in my neighborhood, so I could buy 'em a beer. Any of you open-source developers who live near San Francisco's Zeitgeist, drop me a line and I'll
Re:There goes my Karma. :-( (Score:2)
To continue your analogy, it's true that most people don't give a flying fsck about their fridge, but you've got to expect to see a slightly different take at the Maytag fanboy web site.
SourceForge claims 95k projects and 1M members (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:SourceForge claims 95k projects and 1M members (Score:2)
Re:SourceForge claims 95k projects and 1M members (Score:2)
But 1 million sourceforge users. You'd have to assume a lot of inactive accounts to even approach the "tens of thousands" figure, let along "hundreds". You'd have to assume that 10,000 people registered sourceforge accounts, for every person who contributed code, to even get near.
Just taking the c
Re:SourceForge claims 95k projects and 1M members (Score:2)
But the bald truth is that most of the projects are either a) dead, or b) minor forks of another project. The same is true of the claims about the number of members.
Debian (Score:2)
I looked at Debian's people page [debian.org], and I counted 1506 entries. These people are actively maintaining a part of Debian.
How? I grepped for "<a name=", which seems to match the correct lines. There are several "group" entries, so this number is only a rough estimate. (A group implies at least one member, but some people belong to more than one group.)
Re:Debian (Score:2)
7 persons (directly) (Score:2)
(and with the other six lads).
Ok, there's code in from OpenBSD, NetBSD(TM),
FreeBSD(TM), MicroBSD, the FSF, the ASF,
the XFree86 Project, Thomas Dickey (Lynx, cdk),
Jörg Schilling (mkisofs), Perl and Sendmail.
But that's only the indirect contributors.
How about Windows? (Score:2)
Re:How about Windows? (Score:1)
The origianl developer left the company and the code is so obscure that the rest of the developers at M$ can't continue the work on IE.
funny thing (Score:3, Funny)
Bad Microsoft guy! Start up the FUD again, this truth thing is horrible! Bad bad!
Re:funny thing (Score:2)
Did we read the same article? This guy talks about "the number of people who contribute to the kernel tree", then infers that it is equal to the number of skilled developers who are "writing for" open source (whatever the hell that means).
What MS is really saying .... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:What MS is really saying .... (Score:3, Interesting)
It shoots ok, and you only need that one.
Unix on the other hand, makes lots of different types of guns, each with a different purpose and different caliber. But the unix guns would each be exceptional, never misfire, and be more accurate, reliable, and cheaper.
The
Re:What MS is really saying .... (Score:2)
Oh shit I can't be laughing out loud in my cube...
Re:What MS is really saying .... (Score:2)
I think of it more this way. The great advantage of open source is that by forking, bad ideas have their own branch of the evoloutionary tree to die on. Looked at in hindsight, it doesn't look like a fork at all: the good ideas become seen as the "trunk" of the tree and the bad ones the dead end offshoots.
The cruft that is left is relatively benign or still serves a useful purpose well enough in their an
Re:What MS is really saying .... (Score:2)
The "legacy" that Linux supports is:
BSD 4+ and SVR4
Get a copy of "UNIX Systems Programming for SVR4" from O'Reilly (ISBN 1-5659-163-1); that will describe the system that Linux is compatible with.
The same reference will cover "BSD"isms as well. "UNIX Network Programming" by W. Richard Stevens is also a good reference for "legacy" code.
Please note that the BEHAVIOUR of this legacy code is well known; making it easier to support. Not much question on what to do. Whereas, with Windows, there is
How do you count? (Score:2, Insightful)
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
How many doesn't count. (Score:2)
Don't forget about the testers (Score:2)
Not sure what your beef really is about (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Those e-mail addressess. (Score:2)
Re:Those e-mail addressess. (Score:2, Informative)
* 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
How do you count it? (Score:1)
Re:How do you count it? (Score:2)
Don't forget (Score:1)
Google knows the answer (Score:2)
Microsoft research (Score:2)
Given some of the tripe they come out with I believe it's a bit of both.
I do wonder what point they are trying to make, are they trying to say that having a small number of people working on a component is good? or that there's not enough people working on the kernel.