[ITK Community] [Insight-developers] A Contrib group?

[Luis Ibanez]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 4:31 PM, Bradley Lowekamp <blowekamp at mail.nih.gov>wrote:

>
>  Specifically what were the problems, from the previous Review?
>
>

IMHO:


                                                    Raw Lack of Manpower.



The critical mass of developers needed to support a software system in an
open source
environment is:

                                        1 developer per 1,000 lines of code

Details here:


http://opensource.com/education/13/11/linux-kernel-community-growth

This is BTW, from training exercises that we organized to bring new
developers into
the Linux Kernel community:


http://opensource.com/education/13/11/training-college-students-contribute-linux-kernel



If we exclude the Third Party libraries, ITK has close to 500,000 lines of
code.

Therefore, we need:

                                                        500 developers


These are, of course, not full time developers, but developers who work
according
to the typical power log distribution:


http://public.kitware.com/pub/itk/gitstat/ITK-2013-03-02/authors.html


The stagnation of code in the Review directory is one of the illustrations
that our
current community of ITK developers, (despite of how active, smart, and
handsome
we are) is simply numerically under powered:

http://www.ohloh.net/p/itk/contributors/summary
http://www.ohloh.net/p/itk/contributors?query=&sort=commits



Where are we going to find 500 developers ?

ITK is downloaded 62,874 times a year ( ~ about 5,000 times per month )
== (166 times per day) == (7 times per hour):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/itk/files/itk/stats/timeline?dates=2013-01-01+to+2014-01-01


This doesn't includes the Git cloning, nor the use of ITK through packages
installed in popular Linux distributions such as Debian, Mint and Ubuntu.


These large number of community members who are downloading ITK out there,
are the perfect group to train and empower, so that they become the next
generation
of ITK developers.


Software development is labor-intensive. Our processes can facilitate
the work of maintaining the toolkit, but they do not remove the essential
need for having a large community of active developers.


We could rant from our rocking chairs about how much work is not being
done, but, it might be more productive and realistic to take active steps to
train and empower a sufficient number of new developers, (starting with
a couple hundred) and restore the balance of manpower that can ensure
that the toolkit is self-sustained.



       Luis
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