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Title: As KDE Turns 30, Contributors and Commits are Going Strong

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/09/21/0647...

"In a few weeks, KDE will turn 30 years old," writes core contributor Kevin
Ottens, celebrating with some special KDE community data analytics (including
a 30-year graph of the number of contributors): It peaks around 180 on
average (and sometimes reaches towards around 200 people) then shrinks again
hitting bottom around 110 persons on average in 2017... Since then, we had
two major events happening. First, 2018 is the year where we had the first
set of KDE Goals being picked by the community, one being "Streamlined
onboarding of new contributors". Second, we had the transition to GitLab
which was fully delivered early in the second quarter of 2020... Now it seems
like the team size is around 140 people on average, so closer to the all time
high of 2010 but we didn't fully close the gap yet. Interestingly though, the
commit count is much closer to the one we had in 2010, with a bit less
people. We even had an all time high commit count in 2023 which surpassed any
other week since the creation of the project. And to make things even
brighter, the trends at the end of the plot point upwards. Looks like 2026
will be a very good year. Hopefully the growth will stay stable this time and
then the community will be the biggest it's ever been... [For the KDE Plasma
desktop] We find the 2010 dip but it's much less dramatic than in all the
other plots. It stabilized much quicker and managed to stay with an almost
identical team size. We also find the increase leading up to 2020. And
clearly it's one of the projects which benefitted the most of the GitLab
transition. It's average team size almost doubled during the transition!
Earlier I asked where the increase we could see on KDE as a whole but not on
applications was coming from? Well, this is probably it. Like the rest of
KDE, 2026 will be a very good year for Plasma as well. I wonder... will it
double in size again next year compared to 2020? "I'm rather happy that KDE
as a whole seems very healthy..." the post concludes. "It looks like in
almost 30 years KDE built a great community and many awesome products..."
"Kudos to all the people involved for the past 30 years! Even if you're not
involved any more you helped contribute something beautiful and precious to
the world. We're the living proof that large commons can be created and made
sustainable thanks to passionate people."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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