via 451 CAOS Theory

Great post about some impressive figures from the Linux kernel development.

• There have been almost 10,000 patches in each recent quarterly Linux kernel release.
• Releases include work from ~1,000 developers and ~100 companies.
• Since 2005, Linux has had more than 3,600 individual developers and more than 250 companies contributing to the kernel.
• The individual development community has tripled in the last three years.
• The top 10 developers have contributed 15% of changes, and the top 30 developers have contributed 30% of changes to the kernel.
• Linus Torvalds is 27th on the list of contributors with most changes over the last few years. He has 495 to his name.
• More than 11,500 or 14% of kernel changes have come from developers with no commercial entity backing their Linux development.
• Another 13% of changes come from developers with ‘unknown’ commercial affiliation.
• When we get to actual companies, Red Hat leads with 9,351 kernel changes, or 11.2%. Next is Novell with 8.9%, IBM with 8.3% and Intel with 4.1% of kernel changes.
• More than 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work.
• From the 2.6.11 kernel to the 2.6.24 release (1,140 days), there were an average of 2.8 accepted patches applied to the Linux kernel tree per hour.
• An average of more than 3,600 lines of code is added to the Linux kernel tree every day.
• Since 2005, the kernel has grown at a steady rate of 10% per year.

Gosh, if this is not showing the incredible health and dynamism of the Linux community!

cross-posted on the innoveo blog.