On Mon, Nov 16, 1998 at 05:37:46PM -0500, Bob Munck wrote:
> You're right, I did drop a zero; it should have said "50,000 function
> points." However, that's only one order of magnitude, not several.
> Do you really think Linux has 500K or 5M function points?
I'm talking about all the bits and pieces that make up a typical
open-source system, not just the Linux kernel. And yes, if you
put together something like a typical Internet server-in-a-box
on PC hardware, with:
- Slackware Linux
- sendmail
- majordomo (to run mailing lists)
- procmail (to handle incoming mail)
- BIND (for DNS)
- INN (for Usenet news)
- trn (news client for testing)
- mutt (mail client for testing)
- Apache
- Perl (for cgi-bin and others)
- fetchmail (POP client for testing)
- gcc (to build the above)
- flex/bison (")
- GNU libc (")
then you are most probably now dealing with a developer community
up around the 50,000 mark.
And that's without getting into applications, GUIs, development
tools, and all the other stuff.
My best guess -- based on back-of-the-envelope calculations like
the one I gave in my message, plus download statistics from various
sites, plus 15 years of continuous work in the freeware world, is
that the current Linux & etc. development community numbers somewhere
around 500,000. The user community is probably about ten times that size.
So I'm not sure why you think the number is so low; unless you're
using "function points" in a way different from the meaning I'm
used to. ("People who play a functional role in a development
environment.")
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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