Linux Kernel Development Statistics

Linux is undoubtedly the largest and the most vibrant open source project till date. The following statistics from the Linux Kernel Development article quantify this massive effort.

*Around 3,621 lines were added, 1,550 lines were removed, and 1,425 lines were changed every day for the past 2.5 years

*A small number of companies (like Novell, Redhat) are responsible for a large number of changes. But there is a "long tail" of companies which have made significant changes.

*There is a new Linux kernel release every 2.7 months.

*The top 10 individual developers have contributed almost 15 % of the changes and the top 30 developers have contributed 30 %. Thus there are few developers who contribute a lot and lots of developers which contribute a few. There is a marked inequality of work.

* 70% of the kernel development is done by developers who are being paid by the companies for their work.

* Individual development community has doubled in the last 3 years.

Commercial Organizations Involved

Washington Redskins cheerleaders for Indian Cricket. That's serious commercialization.

The Washington Redskins Cheerleaders will travel to India, under the aegis of Kingfisher moghul Vijay Mallya, to create the first ever professional cheerleading squad in India.
Click here for the complete article.

Cricket hits Internet in the West! Good step towards commercialization

Communicate.com Inc. dba Live Current Media Inc. (OTCBB: CMNN), a media company built around content and commerce destinations, announced that it will launch IPLT20.com tomorrow as the official site for the DLF Indian Premier League. As outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), Live Current will become the exclusive online provider of content from the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the DLF Indian Premier League. This signifies the first cricket-related content and distribution relationship by Live Current as the Company plans to build and launch its Cricket.com asset as the future cricket DestinationHub™ for cricket fans globally. Click here for the complete story.

Also featured on TechCrunch and VentureBeat.

I am Creative!

As a HR department requirement I took the DISC profile questionnaire. DISC stands for: D – Dominance; I – Influence; S – Steadiness; C – Conscientious. I scored the highest on the 'D' dimension. My DISC profile matched with the "Creative" personality template.

I was a bit skeptic about such a theory/activity however after reading the DISC report I was amazed. The profile closely described my characteristics and behavior. The report described my work habits, motivation and gave some insights about me to the supervisors/boss. Thinking introspectively I think the model described 'me' perfectly (and also some of my weak areas). Take the DISC profile questionnaire if you are wondering about your qualities, work habits, strengths, weaknesses and capabilities. It really helps! Also let me know if your profile matched mine. May be its worthwhile to know each other and share experiences.

Introduction to Principal Component Analysis

Recently I delivered a seminar on Principal Component Analysis at University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati. Presentation is available as a PDF file. The PCA method is explained with a simple example wherein the Graduate Office has to admit 2 students out of 4 applications received based on three dimensions i.e. GRE score, GPA and the Professor Rating. Principal Component Analysis or simply PCA is a data dimension reduction technique popularly used in case of a multidimensional data. It calculates the principal components which are linear combinations of the observations in the direction of maximum variance.

Open Source Projects double every 14 months!

Based on the models developed for the "Exponential Growth of Open Source" study we calculated the time required to double the number of projects and the total open source code. It took approximately 13.89 months to double the total number of open source projects from 1995-2006. Please refer the "The Total Growth of Open Source" paper for the details of the approach and analysis. On the same lines, it took around 12.49 months to double the total open source lines of code for the projects considered. That means every year (plus a month or so) both the total number of projects and lines of code double! The interesting question is: Can Open Source sustain this exponential growth?