Size of teams behind Linux distros

[Donnie Berkholz]

On 12:53 Fri 13 Apr     , Patrice Dumas wrote:
> 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).

The number of people might be a better measure of how much of the 
community is interested in contribution than of how much work is really 
going into a distribution, for all the reasons you mention.

But then you get into other issues like ease of becoming a committer 
across different projects, etc.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Council Member / Sr. Developer, Gentoo Linux <http://dberkholz.com>
Analyst, RedMonk <http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/>
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