Linux Facts and figures

Linux first saw the light of day on September 17, 1991, when Linus Torvalds, then 22 years old, put the source code of the first version of his kernel online.

[…] Im doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional […]“

Linus Torvalds

Facts and figures about Linux

In the releases before the 25th anniversary Torvalds integrated an average of 13,750 changes, today it is over 16,250 commits per release. Converted to the entire development period, that is 10.4 changes per hour.

In the main development phase, almost 45 changes per hour flow into the main development branch. Ultimately, a commit occurs every 80 seconds on average.

The number of lines added per version is also rising steadily: in the last six versions, the average was 385,000 lines each.

According to evaluations of the Linux Foundation only about 12% of the Linux developers are hobby developers. 84 percent are somewhere employed and screw in the order of their employers at Linux along.

With Linux 5.13, the current most current version of the main development line, for the first time over 2,000 different developers contributed ever at least one change to the release. 329 of them contributed something for the first time.

If the upward trend in terms of development speed and scope continues until the 35th birthday as it has recently, the Linux sources should then in any case consist of more than 40 million lines and some releases will contain more than 20,000 changes.