Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

Linux is unstoppable: the contributor base is still growing.

Interesting article over at LinuxWorld.com:

A graph of all the developers involved in the upcoming 2.6.22 release, and the relationships of who reviewed whose patches, extends to a 40-foot-long printout with names in tiny type. The graph is on display at the Ottawa event.

The new “mess” results in innovative new features getting integrated into Linux distributions much more quickly, says Jonathan Corbet, author of the camera driver for One Laptop Per Child and another co-author of Linux Device Drivers. Previously, when developers maintained both “stable” and “development” kernels, it could have been two to three years before a feature made it from development to mainstream users.