“Linux is doing incredibly well, and we’ve come a long way in a short amount of time.”
Those were the opening remarks from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin at today’s inaugural LinuxCon event in Portland, OR.
Zemlin greeted the 600-plus crowd of attendees at the conference with a high degree of excitement, pleased to note the strength of the event and the promise that it should bring to the Linux development, user, and business community.
In his brief introduction, Zemlin highlighted some key numbers that are a part of the Linux ecosystem.
- 1. There’s only one Linus Torvalds. It’s the 18th birthday of Linux this year, and there is no end to the amount of innovation coming.
- 2,700,000. Number of lines of code added to kernel in the last year according to the recently updated “Who Writes Linux” paper from the Linux Foundation.
- 10,923. Numer of lines of code added to the Linux kernel every day.
- 5,547. Number of lines deleted every day.
Of key interest to the business side are recent estimates of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from IDG:
- 1.8% CAGR. The 2008-2009 growth rate for UNIX.
- 6.6% CAGR. The rate of growth for Windows in the same period.
- 23.6% CAGR. The rate for Linux, recently increased by IDG to account for the recession.
Zemlin emphasized many other numbers that represent the community, which can be seen in the free streaming video of this and all other keynotes for LinuxCon.
