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A comment on Only a few vendor-paid developers do almost all open-source work. Parent comment

Re:Only a few vendor-paid developers do almost all open-sour... by sonnyblarney on Saturday June 16, 2018 @05:16PM (#17329471)
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'.

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Re:Only a few vendor-paid developers do almost all open-sour... by ghaff on Saturday June 16, 2018 @05:26PM (#17329520)
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.
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Re:Only a few vendor-paid developers do almost all open-sour... by trumped on Saturday June 16, 2018 @07:48PM (#17330134)
> It makes sense because most software works this way anyhow

What does that mean?

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Re:Only a few vendor-paid developers do almost all open-sour... by prepend on Saturday June 16, 2018 @09:15PM (#17330402)
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.

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