On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 02:14:05PM -0500, Jason Hsu wrote: > I've been curious about the size of the teams behind Linux distros. I > met a Gentoo developer at the Minnebar conference last Saturday and > learned that there are about 200 people working on Gentoo and about > 1000 people working on Debian. I understand that the productive Linux > Mint team is surprisingly small, though I have no idea how small. > (50? 20? 10? Even fewer?) > > How big are the teams that you're familiar with?
It is in fact rather hard to count the size of a distro. In the case of Debian (I'm using Debian as an example because I know it well, but most of what I'm saying can be applied to others), these are the official statistics: https://nm.debian.org/public/stats/ It's 951 full developers, plus 170 debian maintainers. However, of those (especially of the full developers) there are an unspecified number who are not very active anymore and have not yet been spotted by the MIA team[1]. So looking at official membership numbers you have a bias based on how inactive members are detected, and also a bias based on how high each distribution raises the bar of official membership. However, there are also many people who do packaging work and are not DDs or DMs[2], plus another number of people who do not do packaging work, are not official developers but still regularly do translation work. We are brainstorming how to track such non-packaging contributions so that we can acknowledge their contributors like we do with packagers, but still cannot do that properly. Still depending on where you draw the line, a distribution is also built by people sending patches to the BTS, or helping out staffing booths at events, or helping people in web forums or participating in local communities, or adopting it at work, or building solutions or businesses on it. And if an ecosystem is healthy, then the work done by people on derivatives should eventually get contributed on the main distribution. And each derivative has its own ecosystem which is rather hard to track. It even took quite some effort to start a census to track Debian derivatives themselves[3]. The point here is that if one wants to estimate the manpower that ends up in a distro, it's probably more fair to look at the size of the ecosystem rather than the number of official developers. Although, indeed, that is really rather hard to estimate. [1] http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/MIATeam [2] http://mentors.debian.net/ has many examples, but it also happens in several teams in Debian. [3] http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enr...@enricozini.org>
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