GNOME Census - A Glance Into Developer Participation In GNOME

As a GNOME user, have you ever wondered - How big is the GNOME project ? What is its make up ? How are decisions taken ? And how many GNOME developers are there ? If yes, then you need look no further. Because Neary Consulting - A Free software consultancy, has released the GNOME Census giving an overview of the GNOME project and its functions. The census report analyzes how developers participate in the GNOME project and looks for patterns within the project itself.


A glance through the GNOME census report brings out the following details -

• The GNOME 2.30 release and external dependencies consists of 189 modules. This represents 13 years of coding, and over 468000 individual changesets. 
• Since the project's inception, over 3000 individuals have committed changes.
• The most prolific 5% of the developers (top 165) have together made 65% of all the changes in the 13 year history of GNOME.
• Red Hat is said to be the biggest contributor to the project and its core dependencies, with its employees being responsible for nearly 17% of all commits. Canonical, Collabora, Fluendo, Intel, Novell, and Sun Microsystems have also contributed substantially to the GNOME project.
• 70% of the GNOME developers are volunteers. A further 20% say they have contributed to GNOME project both as a volunteer and a paid developer.

The full report titled "The GNOME Census : Who writes GNOME ?" is available as a free download from Neary Consulting.