Are there really thousands of little elves writing open source software?

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing has a good article up today about who really wrote the Linux source code and based upon that how big is the community and what do they really do.  A lot of what Don writes comes from a post on LWN.net, however I think the trends in this article are probably even more acute in other smaller open source projects. 

The gist of of the article is that in fact in the case of the Linux 2.6.2 release, only twenty people contributed 50% of the code for the project. He also looks at what domains and so probably what companies the contributors work for. Again a small amount of companies. He makes an interesting assertion that despite being a huge consumer and user of open source software, Google contributes virtually nothing back to the community. Nada, zero, zilch.  I guess Don wants to make the point that Google is a parasite of the open source community.  Remember that Don works for Microsoft though.  Maybe Google should claim some patents on Linux and try to get some of the Linux providers to pay for patent protection.  But I digress, this is not about Google and Microsoft.

What this is about is the fact that in spite of what many of you believe, the fact is most open source projects are maintained, developed and source code is contributed by a small fraction of the user community.  There are not thousands of little elves out in cyberland contributing software to open source projects.  In fact Don says his research is showing that only about 8% or less of open source users even look at or change the source code.

So if it is not about source code access, what is it?  It is free, that is certainly a big piece of it.  Is there anything else?  I think Don is right, people pick open source alternatives when it is easy and makes sense for the task they are using it for.  The people who care most about source code access are those who are going to build their own products on top of the open source code.  This is why all of the dual licenses around open source and why according to Matt Asay since 2000 almost 1.8 billion dollars has been invested in open source.