Bob's assertion that there were 5,000 "function points" got me to
thinking. Intuitively, I know that's several orders of magnitude
too small, but I have a penchant for wanting to quantify everything
that I can. So...
I decided that I'd take a look at the size of some of the communities
out there in the world of open source software. The way I did this was
to count the number of unique addresses sending mail to some of the
mailing lists that I'm on. Of course, since (a) many of these
communities have other mailing lists that I'm not on, (b) they also
communicate by newsgroups, web sites, and other channels I don't follow,
(c) this only counts people who have sent messages, thus missing
the silent members, and (d) my readily-accessible archives of some of
these mailing lists don't go back very far in some cases, all of these
are drastic underestimates.
But I think they give an idea of the size of the tip of the iceberg.
Redhat Linux (redhat, -announce, -rpm, -sparc, -install):
5231 unique addresses since 3/23/98
Linux router project:
128 unique addresses since 10/28/98
Linux on laptops:
165 unique addresses since 10/23/98
Majordomo (mailing list manager) (-users, -announce, -workers, -docs):
6167 unique addresses since 11/2/94
Mutt (mail client) (-dev, -announce, -users):
828 unique addresses since 11/5/97
Procmail (mail filter):
2900 unique addresses since 9/13/95
Note that the overlap across these is pretty small: there are a total
of 15419 addresses represented above, of which 15000 are unique.
I think this is because a lot of people in the open source world
are consumers of many projects, but contributors to just a few.
Or to put it in perspective, there are more people represented in
this tiny snapshot -- which doesn't include some of the most popular
or most visible bits of open source software, like Apache, sendmail,
Slackware Linux, Debian Linux, Caldera Linux, KDE, GNOME, Perl, tcl/tk,
any of the GNU tools, X, BIND, PGP, INN and other Usenet tools --
than Microsoft has developers.
Of course, not everyone represented in this snapshot is a skilled
developer; then again, not everyone at Microsoft is either, and
that includes those whose titles would presume they are.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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