“After building the infrastructure to analyse the code in an
Ubuntu release I decided to satisfy a simple curiosity and figure
out how much GNU software is actually part of a modern
distribution. I picked Ubuntu natty (released in April) as a
reference, am counting lines of code (LOC) as the rough metric for
size of a given project, and am considering only the ‘main’
repository, supposedly the core of the distribution, actually
packaged by Ubuntu and not repackaged from Debian.“I found two things to be really surprising in this chart. The
first is that the kernel is actually comparable in size to all the
GNU software1. The second is that small projects actually dominate
the total amount.”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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