Linux Stans reports on a Reddit analysis that downloaded the full commit history of 23 projects phones, browsers and servers depend on and counted everyone making ten or more changes between October 2025 and October 2026, finding that 11 of the 23 have only one or two regular contributors. xz has a single regular contributor, Lasse Collin, who wrote 97 percent of its changes in 2025 and has received no new money since the 2024 backdoor, while sudo saw 5,408 of its 5,409 commits from 2008 to 2018 come from one person, Todd Miller, and eight projects including the time zone database, SQLite, zlib, xz and bash show no grant or sponsorship in the public funding sources checked. The piece contrasts that with OpenSSL, which lived on about $2,000 a year in donations until the Linux Foundation raised $5.4 million within two months of Heartbleed in 2014 and the project gained paid developers and an audit, and it also notes where r/linux readers disputed the contributor-counting method.
11 of 23 Core Open Source Projects Run on 1 or 2 People
Linux Stans reports on a Reddit analysis that downloaded the full commit history of 23 projects phones, browsers and servers depend on and counted everyone making ten or more changes between October 2025 and October 2026, finding that 11 of the 23 have only one or two regular contributors. xz has a single regular contributor, Lasse Collin, who wrote 97 percent of its changes in 2025 and has received no new money since the 2024 backdoor, while sudo saw 5,408 of its 5,409 commits from 2008 to 2018 come from one person, Todd Miller, and eight projects including the time zone database, SQLite, zlib, xz and bash show no grant or sponsorship in the public funding sources checked. The piece contrasts that with OpenSSL, which lived on about $2,000 a year in donations until the Linux Foundation raised $5.4 million within two months of Heartbleed in 2014 and the project gained paid developers and an audit, and it also notes where r/linux readers disputed the contributor-counting method.
Source: Linuxstans