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| Linux Programmer Numbers Clarified |
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Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 06:03 PM EST
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PC Pro's Matt Whipp did a good thing. Instead of parroting Microsoft numbers, he actually went to the trouble to find out if what he had been fed was true. It wasn't. The question was, how many programmers there actually are contributing to Linux and Open Source. It seems Microsoft's Nick McGrath, head of platform strategy for Microsoft in the UK recently told him that IBM has just 'handfuls' of such developers. Whipp did what journalists are supposed to do. He asked IBM and some others who would know, and they told him that there are millions of programmers worldwide working on FOSS.
Here's a bit from his article [reg. req'd]: Adam Jollans is IBM's Worldwide Linux Software Marketing Strategy Manager, and begged to differ. 'Right now, our Linux technology centre is about 800 strong - developers paid by IBM working directly on open source projects,' he said.
He said this had doubled in the course of a couple of years and that overall there were 8,000 to 9,000 IBM employees working on the company's Linux strategy.
Bill Weinberg, Open Source Architecture Specialist and Evangelist at Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) said, 'To cite a some very visible examples, there are 95,982 registered projects on SourceForge.net and over 1,000,000 registered users. OSDL member companies alone employ over 2000 Linux developers.
'The total number is, of course, difficult to estimate with any precision, but even pessimistic assessments place the number of FOSS developers worldwide in the millions.' . . .
The strong presence of open source developers on the payroll of commercial companies, does not undermine the integrity of the open source movement. Both Jollans and Weinberg agree that it doesn't matter who develops open source code, or what the motivation, contributions are only accepted into projects such as the Linux kernel based on the quality of the code.
Says Weinberg: 'It is a meritocracy. It follows the precepts of the Scientific Method. For the Linux kernel, there is an organised hierarchy in place that helps spread out the workload. A group of about 50 key developers oversee the final contribution of code to the kernel.' You might enjoy reading
the paper, "Coase's Penguin" by Yochai Benkler PDF, who writes about "the collective power of openness and the superiority of open source economics." See also the Mitchel Kapor interview on Tom's Hardware, who references the paper and discusses open source, business models and Microsofts future. From Benkler's abstract: For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. . . . In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers contributing to large and small scale project, where the central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. . . . The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to price signals.
In this paper I explain that while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.
The paper also explains why this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the capital investment necessary for production-computers and communications capabilities-is widely distributed instead of concentrated. Enjoy! Oh, and share it with your PHB, please. And his lawyer. If you are the PHB, please read it yourself.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 06:20 PM EST |
| The 2nd to last link is slightly messed up in the html. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Minsk on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 06:29 PM EST |
<a href="http://the-url-here">The Label</a>
and set HTML Formatted below. To keep your formatting together, add in a
<p> when you want a new paragraph. Some other standard HTML tags are
available. If you need to type < > or &, use < > and
& respectively.
Really, it was "handfuls". Just many, many, many handfuls...[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 06:29 PM EST |
| Better yet if your day job is writing Linux or FOSS code. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: eckenheimer on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 06:39 PM EST |
Maybe Matt Whipp could clarify the numbers in SCOG's press releases, where
they say: "The SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX) helps millions of customers in
more than 82 countries to grow their businesses everyday. Headquartered in
Lindon, Utah, SCO has a worldwide network of more than 11,000 resellers
and 4,000 developers."
I strongly suspect that the millions of customers is at best a 3 digit number
today, and I doubt that you'd need to take off your shoes to count thier
"worldwide network" of resellers and developers.
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In a world without walls or fences, who needs windows or gates?[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 07:00 PM EST |
What's a "PHB" ?
John[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 07:29 PM EST |
How many people work on the Linux kernel itself?
I always assumed that the handful reference applied to just the kernel, but I
could have read the original quote wrong. I assumed that direct kernel
developers numbered at a few thousand at most and more likely a few hundred.
I thought it was more like how many people contribute to FreeBSD's kernel + base
userland.
Asking how many open source developers contribute to linux + all other software
that runs under linux can only really be compared to how many people work on
Windows + all other software that runs under Windows regardless of who wrote it.
(A lot of FOSS/linux software runs under Windows these days)
I didn't read the article (obsessive fear of registration on my part) but this
entry didn't really answer what I thought it would.
Sorry if I'm missing the point somewhere.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: surak on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 07:30 PM EST |
| We see lots of people FUDding about the number of Linux and open source
developers.
Of course, there are lots of ways to count developers, but
really no one's keeping good count.
If we just look at the MAINTAINERS file
for a recent kernel, we get:
[surak@dagda linux]$ grep -c
Maintained MAINTAINERS
309
If we subtract 1, which is the
number of times the word "Maintained" appears without actually referring to a
current Maintainer, then there are 308 'Maintainers', plus if we count the
'Supported' maintainers, then we can add 57 to that, so there are in excess of
360 actual maintainers right now, including nearly 60 who get paid to support
it, according to the MAINTAINERS file. But we know that's not an actual
count.
Plus, there's all the open source projects that make up a Linux
distribution. Even if each open source project had only 10 developers,
considering some 200 projects might make up a typical Linux distro, that's over
20,000 developers.
That's quite a bit more than the 50 or so the referenced
article mentions.
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"Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in
one form or another." -- Aleister Crowley [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 07:31 PM EST |
Whipp did what journalists are supposed to do. He asked IBM and some others
who would know, and they told him that there are millions of programmers
worldwide working on FOSS.
Now if he could provide a list of names,
I'd be more inclined to agree. I still think it is several 100's of thousands,
but millions seems as overstated as a "handful" was dismissive.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: rben13 on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 07:46 PM EST |
It Ain't New!
The concepts behind FOSS aren't new. They are the same concepts that power
science itself. I'm not talking about the scientific method, but about the
concept of an intellectual commons where new ideas are shared with enthusiasm,
not locked away.
You can see the parallels with science in much of the FOSS realm. Code is
accepted or rejected on it's own merits, just as scientific ideas are accepted
or rejected on their merits after they are reviewed by other scientists.
Efforts to discover problems and rectify them are spread throughout the
community. As in science, this speeds the investigative process.
I think it's sad that just as the software world is learning how powerful open
methods can be, powerful financial interests in the U.S. and elsewhere are
pushing science in the opposite direction, towards more patents, more secrets,
and less sharing. In the process, I fear that business will kill the goose that
laid the golden egg. Our ability to develop new science to respond to
increasingly complex challenges like emerging diseases and global warming will
be compromised.
Hopefully FOSS will serve as a reminder to all of us that free and open exchange
of ideas is the best way to deal effectively with complex problems, whether they
are found in developing a flexible operating system, or investigating the
properties of Nature.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 08:09 PM EST |
| According to a survey released a year ago from Evans Data, more than 1.1 million
developers in North America contribute to open source projects. One wonders what
the number is for the whole world.
link [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 08:36 PM EST |
Are they talking about the same thing? Consider:
"It seems Microsoft's Nick McGrath, head of platform strategy for Microsoft
in the UK recently told him that IBM has just 'handfuls' of such
developers."
Surely, the millions of developers are not from IBM, so the follow-up research
does not address a statement that IBM has just 'handfuls' of such developers.
(Indeed, multiple handfuls could be a pretty significant number, strictly
speaking anything short of 100 would fit.)
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 23 2005 @ 08:48 PM EST |
Both sides of this argument are probably way off. I'd be surprised if the MS rep
wasn't pushing too far in the low end ("dozens" seems pretty hilarious
given, as noted, OSDL, IBM, SuSE/Novell, RH, etc), and I think Groklaw may be
missing some key points by just citing developer numbers (especially things like
sf.net registrations).
In particular, OSS developers, even more than devs on proprietary software dev
teams, are not equal in their output. There's a big difference between someone
whose day job is writing OSS and someone who does it while juggling university
and another day job. That's not to say the person doing it in their spare time
won't actually be better at it, but on average I'd expect more results from the
person who has the time to spend working on it. For example, Havoc Pennington
probably gets more than a tad more done than me, being both indescribably better
at it and having more time to do it, but many stats would end up counting us the
same. That's just laughable.
I'd also argue that a casual contributor is not really the same as regular,
dedicated developer. Sometimes just as important (the occasional person who
wanders from project to project doing QA, bugfixes, and cleanups, for example),
but not really the same thing. I've submitted bugfixes to a couple of projects,
but I don't think that makes me count as a developer for them.
To top this off, how do you get these developer numbers? One can't exactly
interview each sf.net account holder to find out if they're still active (there
are a lot of dead projects on sf.net) and what they do .... and that's just
sf.net .
My point here is that this is a bad statistic to form any sort of opinion on.
Collecting any stats that aren't pretty much laughable would be a mammoth task,
and even then it'd be very hard to get an idea of their accuracy. There are
better things to focus on than "number of developers". My view is that
anybody who bases any sort of decision on those numbers, especially coming from
any partisan source, probably needs to think carefully about how they evaluate
their choices.
--
Craig Ringer
craig <at> postnewspapers +dot+ com (dot) au[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Statistics - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 24 2005 @ 12:47 AM EST
- Statistics - Authored by: Wol on Thursday, February 24 2005 @ 03:25 AM EST
- Statistics - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 24 2005 @ 06:27 AM EST
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| Authored by: cc0028 on Thursday, February 24 2005 @ 07:59 AM EST |
| I'm sorry, but who cares?
Why would I worry if MS has thousands of times
more programmers than Linux? Isn't it the usefulness of the software that we're
interested in, not how many people it took to produce it?
Only men could
argue in such a way. "Mine's bigger than yours".
Can't we just ignore
stuff them? And if MS are reduced to arguments of this nature, shouldn't we all
rejoice because they must really be clutching at straws?
Peter
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 24 2005 @ 01:43 PM EST |
Imagine you are a programmer for MicroSoft, one of thousands. Their PHB's must
think they are slackers. A handful of FOSS programmers can make products that
threaten their market position. If Microsoft has so many more programmers, what
is holding them back?[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: David on Friday, February 25 2005 @ 11:02 AM EST |
Another drop in the bucket (although it doesn't compare to SourceForge!): add
in the 4193 Perl developers who've contributed modules to the Comprehensive Perl
Archive Network...
The CPAN
:-)
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WARNING: You are logged in to reality as root.... [ Reply to This | # ]
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