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Microsoft Software Linux

Number of People Involved in Your Linux Distro? 76

Posted by Cliff from the break-out-the-abacus dept.
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?"
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Number of People Involved in Your Linux Distro? More

Number of People Involved in Your Linux Distro?

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  • You can count me out (Score:4, Funny)

    by titaniam ( 635291 ) * <slashdot@drpa.us> on Friday February 11, 2005 @10:36AM (#11641190) Homepage Journal
    I haven't contibuted at all, if that helps with your calculations.
  • His name is Patrick...he's all I need...if something is wrong, he's the one I bitch too and get gets it fixed on my behalf...

    • there can't be only one (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ajrs ( 186276 )
      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. :)
    • if something is wrong, he's the one I bitch too

      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.
    • The juxtaposition of comment and signature is excellent.
  • D'you sell'em ? Send proposal to buying@penispillz.com

  • Who cares? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Look, I added one of the command-line options to Konsole. Maybe I'm in your list for that, maybe I'm not. (I should be in there for other reasons, but let that slide.) Does it affect McGrath's point in the slightest whether or not you count me for that work? Especially if you use rxvt or eterm?
  • > it perpetuates the idea it is Linux rather than the
    > 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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 11, 2005 @10:49AM (#11641317)
    ... in a manner of speaking, shouldn't it be everyone who has ever worked on any linxu distro ever?

  • hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by geoffspear ( 692508 ) * on Friday February 11, 2005 @10:50AM (#11641323) Homepage
    What other estimates are there for the number of people who are involved in your distribution,

    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.

    • I know you're joking, but the author was asking how many people, total, were involved in the creation of your Linux distro. So if you forked a distro that included the work of n people, your new distro would be n+1, not just 1.
      • No dude. What you're saying is that anyone that touched anything that went into the distro he touched would count towards n. I think his 1 answer for his distro is correct.

        Jokes are less funny when explained.
        • What you're saying is that anyone that touched anything that went into the distro he touched would count towards n.

          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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 11, 2005 @10:50AM (#11641326)
    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.
    • > 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 m

  • Gentoo Forums (Score:3, Informative)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @10:53AM (#11641364) Homepage Journal
    Our users have posted a total of 2039777 articles
    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.
    • The article was specifically talking about developers.

      McGrath went on to claim that another Linux myth centres on the number of open source developers who work to create the operating system.

      "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," he said.

      "If you look at the number of people who contribute to the kernel tree, you see that a significant amount of the work is just done by

      • The article was specifically talking about developers.

        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.
      • That's actually as I would expect, but IMO not really that relevant. As any of us who've spent time in the real world can probably agree, having more people involved in a project is not necessarily a good thing.

        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)

      by sbennett ( 448295 )

      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.

  • There are thousands of each. Microsoft is more than likely pointing the KEY players involved in development. Go on Gates, leave Linus alone and let him work. Geeze. I wonder if Bill Gates actually dares to read sources like Slashdot , Newsforge, and so forth. If he knew what people "really" thought (Ballmer and even McGrath for that matter as well ), would he say the things he does or campaign as much as he does to defeat us. Of course, who would really dare admit they work for M$ and post in here, sure

    • Re:Users vs Developers vs Admins (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GoofyBoy ( 44399 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @11:04AM (#11641462) Journal
      >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.
      • Still it seems feasible that they would care about all opinions, not just the small subset of opinions they develop internally. Windows is great and other bull!@#$ like that. Of course there have been on occasion Micro$oft developers that have admitted the product is vulnerable or that they admit they took shortcuts and so forth....so really what does their opinion matter....

  • statistics. (Score:2, Funny)

    by leuk_he ( 194174 )
    And don't forget :
    57.3 % of all numbers are meaningless. They are just made up.
    • I heard that it was 63% ! But then, if we don't know the real made up number I'll go with Churchill's statictics "I never trust a statistics that I havn't made my self" (or something like that) :-)

  • Microsoft should be more embarassed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by realnowhereman ( 263389 ) <andyparkins@nOsPam.gmail.com> on Friday February 11, 2005 @11:08AM (#11641500)
    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?

  • There goes my Karma. :-( (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LePrince ( 604021 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @11:12AM (#11641538)
    I'm sorry, this'll sound like a troll, or flamebait, but it is not...

    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)

      by Alpha27 ( 211269 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @11:24AM (#11641706)
      I agree with the parent. To me, it's not about the number of people involved, or how talented they may be, it's about whether the product works, and if it works well.

      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.
    • Well, it wouldn't be an issue except that OSS people have raised the point themselves, with maxims like, "With many eyes, all bugs are shallow." If "many" turns out to be ~100, that's not so impressive.

      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.

      • the number of people who have examined the code isn't equivalent to the number of people who have contributed to the code

        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
    • No, that didn't sound like a troll or flamebait. I was going to post the same thing! Why should it matter? As long as they get the job done, I don't care if an OS was made by one person in a basement of a team of thousands.
    • 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 ?

      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
    • You new here?

      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)

    by DanielJH ( 247965 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @11:14AM (#11641564)
    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.
    • That information is useless for this. There are many projects on SourceForge that only work on Windows, some only are for Mac, others are java-based or even for the .NET platform. I think the java-based ones will be excluded (there is no point in including java-based projects in a linux distro if the runtime itself is out) - and the .NET ones might only be included if they run on Mono.
    • I'm not an expert at sourceforge, but it would seem rather pointless to register an account there if you're not involved in a project. Ok, there are expired accounts, and disinterested accounts and whatnot...

      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
    • Sure. Sourceforge *claims* that many projects and members.

      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.

  • 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.)

    • For each Debian package, there is at least one author, and many more in some cases. I don't know the number, but Debian sid contains at least 15000 packages. Say those packages average three contributors (most might have only one, but the kernel, X, and many major apps have hundreds). That's 45000 developers, in addition to the 1500 Debian maintainers.
  • ... it's because I'm writing the OS myself
    (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.
  • And how many active developers do they currently have chugging away on the Windows source? IE? WMP?

  • funny thing (Score:3, Funny)

    by justins ( 80659 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @12:13PM (#11642519) Homepage Journal
    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!
    • making true statements that would serve to clarify the distinction between "linux the kernel" and "linux the distribution".

      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)

    by gus goose ( 306978 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @12:28PM (#11642762) Journal
    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
    • I think that if microsoft was making a gun, it would be a bad, all-purpose gun that takes all the types of bullets ever made, misfired once in a while, and you'd have to disassemble and reassemble the fireing mechanism (reboot) once in a while.

      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
    • So you're saying Linux doesn't have cruft? Then what do you call the Unix file permission system?

      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
    • gus goose:

      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)

    by davidwr ( 791652 )
    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
  • How many people work on it? The correct answer is "As many who want to." That's the big difference. Does number of people actually doing the work matter so much?
  • Software companies have more testers than developers or they create crap software. Reproducing a problem is half the work of fixing it, or you can never know what caused it and if you fixed it. Don't discount them.
  • 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
  • Are all of those old e-mail addresses still valid?
    • 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
  • a developer for red-hat or novell might work fulltime, but the developers who work on projects for free might work one hour a day or even just a couple of hours a month. to count this you need statistical material of how much a developer works, how many developers there are and then turn this into "fulltime developers" Also, there are developer working for the distros, developers working on individual projects (kde gnome, linux, gnu tools, kanjii translation and whatnot) It would be really interesting to f
  • that since most of it is gpl you have to count developers of all distributions, since the code they work on gets incorporated into the original projects, and then get incorporated into all distros eventually...
  • This is all that's needed to answer such a silly question: Googlefight [googlefight.com]!
  • You have to ask yourself how come Microsoft seem to know so much about Linux. Either they release a lot of FUD and propaganda or they really are spending a lot of time analysis the Linux market.

    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.

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