Monday, March 13, 2006

GIMP and OpenOffice Not Written by Hobbyists

I had the good fortune to get a comment from Maurits on yesterday's post about GIMP and OpenOffice.

I was wrong. GIMP and OpenOffice are not really written by "hobbyist" programmers.

Instead, there is a core team of just a few programmers who contribute a large amount of the work. Then, a large number of hobbyists around the world contribute to that body of work.

I had the impression that the work was much more spread out.

Here is Maurits' comment:

GIMP and OpenOffice aren't written by hobbyists. There's a small core team of developers that are paid for and do probably 80 - 90 % of the work. The remaining 10 - 20 % is done by a large group of hobbyists like me who try to free up a few hours in the evenings.

Look for example at the ChangeLog file for the GIMP. You will see that most work is done by 3 or 4 developers.


Thanks Maurits!

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