is 42,000 a lot?

[Philippe Lhoste]

The number of contributors is hard to estimate anyway.
For a long time, I contributed to an open source project (Scintilla, and 
its companion, SciTE) just by sending modified files to the main 
developer. He still accept these changes...

The project exists for many years, so it has a long list of 
contributors, visible in the About box of SciTE.
Some people provide significant, large parts of the project, others just 
give a fix or a small feature they need.
So the number of contributors isn't necessarily a significant figure for 
a project (at least, alone).
Beside, if it is estimated on the number of accounts registered on the 
project, it is totally wrong on this project, due to its particular 
management... :-)

And of course, many projects (libraries, small games/utilities, etc.) 
are one-man projects.

-- 
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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