Greg Stein <gst...@gmail.com> wrote on 06/03/2011 02:13:43 AM: > > I don't see any of this discussion about numbers being helpful, only > divisive. "My numbers are right." "No, they're not. See?" "But those numbers > are too small." >
I agree, especially if the numbers are not relevant to the question at hand. It was brought up, and I think it is a legitimate point, whether the proposed project will have enough developers to sustain it. Numbers were tossed around about the hundreds of developers that LibreOffice claims to have. But there is certainly a difference between: Dev 1: 10,000 units of code Dev 2: 1 unit of code Dev 2: 1 unit of code . . . Dev 100: 1 unit of code and: Dev 1: 2,501 units of code Dev 2: 2,501 units of code Dev 3: 2,500 units of code Dev 4: 2,500 units of code Ignore for the moment that any given metric unit here can be manipulated. Think of this in the abstract. Different distributions follow from different community structures, based on depth of talent, the difficulty of the code base, the number of corporate sponsored developers, etc. To have an estimate for the number of developers necessary to create an Apache OpenOffice community, knowing the total number of developers on another project is irrelevant. If there is a long tail of 1-time patch submitters, that may be useful for community development, encouraging new stronger developers who might impact the project more down the road, etc. But it doesn't really answer the question of what is *necessary* to get the project running. That is why my estimate looked at how many developers were responsible for 90% of the code contributions in the last 6 months. That is a more robust estimator, less skewed by the distribution. It is a better indication, I think, for this purpose. So if our LibreOffice colleagues have an easy way of deriving this number, I think it would be very useful to have. I'd certainly be appreciative if they could calc this, if not too much trouble. Regards, -Rob --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
