You said he mostly works alone. That's something different than amount of code. "Work alone" implies amount of people, not amount of code.

Obviously he started systemd and works full time on it. Then loads of other people work on it as well, but not nearly the same amount as he does.

Kind of sad to start name calling when you're not clear about this yourself.

There are no other significant contributors. I consider that "working mostly alone".

Nope, that is changing the wording to suit yourself. He started the project and is able to work full time on this.

A Mageia packager contributed some very good patches towards systemd. He's not in the email on debian-devel, while he monitors systemd , works with Lennart and others, etc.

See his other email: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/05/msg01367.html

Our Mageia packager is not included. One of the patches he wrote: During the development of the journal he fixed a really important journal memory bug. Took a lot of effort to figure out, etc.

But the arbitrary '100 patches' is introduced. Seems rebuttal is pretty biased.

PS: Upstart has had 17 contributors. Systemd has 15 people with commit access. Systemd seems way more viable.

When you've reduced yourself to arguing whether 80% is "mostly" or not, perhaps it's time to reconsider your position?

In any case, I won't be responding to you anymore.

That's just not true, you are talking bullshit here. You can look into the git repository yourself and see who contributed most lines. And it was Kay Sievers, not even Lennart Poettering.

edit: @nknight followup:

Did you even look into git for yourself? Even with excluding udev the top contributors are:

    613 Fabiano Fidêncio  
    812 Lukas Nykryn
    929 Auke Kok          
   1138 Simon McVittie             
   1149 Marc-Antoine Perennou
   2125 Dan Horák                     
   2215 Thomas Bächler             
   3619 Harald Hoyer
   7924 Michael Biebl
  18850 Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
  30226 Tomasz Torcz               
 168803 Kay Sievers
 170196 Lennart Poettering

On what planet is that "all by Lennart"?!

Did you read the link?

Kay Sievers wrote udev, which Lennart swallowed into systemd and proceeded to make unusable outside his own pet configurations. Exclude the pre-existing udev, which was and should have remained a separate project, and it's all Lennart.

It feels like you are implying Kay didn't work with Lennart. it's simply not true. The systemd mailling list was created in May 2010 and Kay was already registered and posting there. Check the archives. They were working on systemd from the start in a RedHat-Suse joint effort.

Also udev merge into systemd would have not happened without Kay's consent.

And I don't understand why people get downvoted just beacuse they correct you.

[Edit] Typos

I did not downvote, but my guess is because you obviously did not read the email linked to which showed the numbers with udev excluded.

udev and systemd are two separate projects who happen to live in the same repository (nothing wrong with that!) so you have to remember to exclude udev when looking at contributors for systemd.

I did read it. What does it tells you ? Well that Lennart did the commit of the first original. Has it occurred to you that they could have work together on the design ? That Kay might have reviewed/coded all or part of the prototype ?

The git can not show that. And unless Kay himself state the contrary we will not know. Lennart says Kay was associated to the project from the start. If it were not true, wouldn't have Kay said something by now ?

I don't always agree with directions Lennart goes, or on the methods. But that does not justify ferocious ad hominem attacks I've read.

I do not support the idea that Pottering wrote it without consulting people, but what is certain is that he wrote almost all of the code himself and since your comment talked about looking in git I assumed you were talking about code authorship.