My ultra controversial rant about women in computer science is enduring writer’s block, so I’ll present some interesting statistics I found in the latest Linux Kernel 2.6.8 Changelog (3MB, be warned):

• Total Patches:
  $ grep -i "Author: " ChangeLog-2.6.18 | wc -l
  6325
• Number of unique contributors
  $ grep -i "Author: " ChangeLog-2.6.18 | sort | uniq | wc -l
  938
• Number of patches by Andrew Morton (lead maintainer)
  $ grep -i "Author: Andrew Morton" ChangeLog-2.6.18 | wc -l
  133
• Number of patches by Linus Torvalds (father of Linux)
  $ grep -i "Author: Linus Torvalds" ChangeLog-2.6.18 | wc -l
  40
• Number of patches by people with IBM email addresses
  $ grep -i "Author: .*@.*ibm.*\.com" ChangeLog-2.6.18 | wc -l
  387
• Number of unique IBM contributors
  $ grep -i "Author: .*@.*ibm.*\.com" ChangeLog-2.6.18 | sort | uniq | wc -l
  81
• Number of patches by people with Google email addresses
  $ grep -i "Author: .*@google.com" ChangeLog-2.6.18 | wc -l
  11
• Number of unique Google contributors
  $ grep -i "Author: .*@.*google.com" ChangeLog-2.6.18 | sort | uniq | wc -l
  7
• Number of patches by people with GMail email addresses
  $ grep -i "Author: .*@gmail.com" ChangeLog-2.6.18 | wc -l
  466

Take these numbers with grains of salt. Some people use multiple email addresses, others use non-work email addesses — Andrew Morton is a Google employee for instance, but doesn’t use a @google.com address.

I was impressed at the quantity of contributions by IBM, they make up 6.1% of the total number of patches in this release. Good work!