Size of teams behind Linux distros

[Patrice Dumas]

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 not clear to me whether the right number is the number of people
or the number of 'worked' hours, which ought also be separated by 
productivity levels.  If the distribution of those numbers are constant 
over distros, then counting people is right, but otherwise it could be 
quite misleading (depending on what you plan to do with those numbers,
of course).


Another issue is how you account for an activity that produces code that
may be reused.  There are distros derivatives and code flows in both
directions.  Even when the packaging systems are different (like rpm
versus deb), patches from distros that use a very different packaging 
system may be used.

To give an example, ubuntu is a derivative of debian, but with parts
replaced and modified.  When you count the number of people behind
ubuntu, should you count the people working on the packages of debian
that are reused in ubuntu and add up the numbers?  I am pretty sure some
work done on ubuntu is reused in debian.  Do you add that to the count
of debian developpers?

Overall, my point is that the boundaries of what is a distro is clear from 
the user point of view (it is a software repository, a cd to install), may 
also be clear from an organizational point of view (the permimeter of the 
distribution in term of people involved in it could be estimated with the 
number of packagers that can make change to the packages and have done so 
for the last year or something like that) but much less clear from the point 
of view of the code production.

-- 
Pat