"The actual pattern of that growth is interesting to see. As shown in Figure 1, the growth curve of the Linux source code has essentially been linear in nature, with the noted exception of the development versions of Linux. These are represented by the large drops in SLOC values, which occurred whenever a new development series of the Linux kernel (2.1, 2.3, 2.5...) was started....
"To get a better sense of the linear growth, Figure 2 illustrates the amount of code in just the production versions of Linux, which are the even version numbers in the kernel history (1.0, 1.2, 2.0, etc.)..."
