Definitive statements are easy to pick apart, but I think he's basically correct. Pretty much all the open source we use are made by a tiny handful of people. It makes sense because most software works this way anyhow, and when there are large groups involved it takes intense coordination.

The more existential question is: are those 'peripheral' additions critical? Because maybe that 'last mile' is superfluos, i.e. minor bugs and 'nice to have' features, but it's possible they are key contributions.

It's possible that the 'key contributors' are like 'managers' or 'curators' of the project, bringing in the work of others, making decisions about it, possibly borrowing ideas from the community and 'implementing it themselves'.

Yes. And a lot of projects these days emphasize "casual contributors" who work on small external modules, documentation, management (which, as you suggest, isn't explicitly factored into the stats), etc. As the piece suggests, it may be wrong to view open source through a lens of free, happy, and democratic community contributions but it would be equally wrong to say that it's just like proprietary software development.

> It makes sense because most software works this way anyhow

What does that mean?

It means most software projects are actually written by small teams of under 10. When you don’t count all the project staff, testing, operations, user support, etc.

Softwareis typically just lots of small components linked together. Especially super generalizable stuff like popular open source.

The original "study" http://redmonk.com/fryan/2018/04/03/who-contributes-an-analy... has an appropriate title:

> TL; DR: The vast of code contributions to each CNCF projects outside of Kubernetes come from a small subset of users and companies.

InfoWorld sensationalized the title.

Matt is generalizing outside of the CNCF though. He specifically mentions Linux.

Personally, I wouldn't have used the term "all" absent having actually looked at the numbers myself. That said, it's probably at least mostly true, especially if you look at the subproject level in the case of projects like Linux and OpenStack.

> it remains hanged without any evidence on those claims.

While I get where you are coming from, give me a counter example/evidence.

My observation of the open source world is pretty much in sync with the generalization of this article. Even if you might find some good counter example it most likely will be the exception to the rule.

I'm having trouble understanding this view. Of course most of the big projects like Linux or the browsers have corporate backing, but that ignores the huge amount of work done on much smaller projects by unpaid devs. I don't understand how anyone could say "I can’t think of a significant counterexample" as the author does; surely that just reflects his ignorance of anything beyond big corporate projects. Most of the programs I'm interacting with daily are built by volunteers; that's pretty typical of the Linux ecosystem.

Sure, Firefox has corporate backing, but the half dozen or so extensions that make the browser useful for me are all built by volunteers. uBlock, uMatrix, TreeStyleTab, Stylus, etc etc.

My backup software, borg? Built by volunteers. My music software, mpd? Built by volunteers. GIMP, useful for quick edits? Volunteers. My text editor, most of the games I play, terminal utilities, torrent clients? Volunteers too. Even the enormous amount of packaging work and bug triage done for my distribution (Arch Linux) is done by volunteers.

Even KDE and Gnome, I suspect, don't have many devs hired by corps to work on those projects. (Though I might be mistaken.)

Maybe by lines of open source code, rather than number of projects, you'd have an argument that corps do most of the work. But when it comes to the program ecosystem on Linux desktops, you're completely surrounded by a bunch of volunteer projects.

KDE has always had paid developers behind it, but only a handful.

Different companies used to employ people to work on KDE including TrollTech, Nokia, Novell, Blue Systems, Canonical, Red Hat.

I think these days it's only Blue Systems that does so. Maybe also Novell but I could be wrong.

The overwhelming majority of the work is done by community and volunteers.

Gnome always had more corporate backing, primarily Red Hat.