I just found this factoid on Ohloh and I am amazed to read this:

LXDE: Very large, active development team
Over the past twelve months, 26 developers contributed new code to LXDE. This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh. For this measurement, Ohloh considered only recent changes to the code. Over the entire history of the project, 46 developers have contributed. (http://www.ohloh.net/p/lxde/factoids/)

I believe everyone in the LXDE team still considers the project as a rather small project with a small team. There have been many changes and advances, but I would have never guessed that LXDE is one of the big projects. If we see it in regards to Gnome and KDE, the relations become different though. Gnome has 432 developers according to Ohloh and KDE even 482 code contributors. XFCE shows up with 12 coders during the last twelve months.

I wonder how many people actually work in different desktop projects at the same time. We have friendly relationships with many contributors working on different projects already. Chris Wickert for example is a core member of LXDE and at the same time taking care of XFCE packages in Fedora. In the end we all share the same ideas and goals about free and open source and we actually share a lot of the code with many projects, especially with our friends from XFCE.

Everyone, keep up the good work! I hope to see more exchange and friendships among our projects. We welcome everyone to work and cooperate with us even if we have some different views sometimes on specific questions. In the end it is cooperation what makes us – as a software project and a community – advance faster and become better.

Mario Behling

Mario Behling is a German born serial entrepreneur. He founded the lubuntu project, and as the co-founder of FOSSASIA he supports communities to develop open technologies for social change. Mario presently works on SUSI AI from his Singapore base.