There'll be no halt

There'll be no halt

Posted Oct 14, 2006 18:50 UTC (Sat) by kreutzm (guest, #4700)
In reply to: There'll be no halt by coriordan
Parent article: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

"Free software is written by hundreds of thousands of people" - where do you get that estimate from? A few thousand, I would guess, maybe 20,000 or a little more. Debian has roughly 1000 members, I remember a figure a while back that the kernel had a few hundred serious contributors.

Unless, of course, you count every person registered on Source Forge. This maybe technically speaking correct then, but quite misleading, as even Debian ships only small fraction of this software and most people are quite happy with the free software shipped.

If you have a sound number, I'd definitly be interested.

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There'll be no halt

Posted Oct 14, 2006 18:57 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

KDE alone has nearly a thousand committers, so, yes there will easily be
hundreds of thousands of developers working on free software projects even
if you discount the sourceforge projects that never progressed beyond an
initial idea. This world of ours is _big_.