Recently, I was talking to a tech journalist friend of mine who has been covering Microsoft since the company's inception. He made the point that nobody at Microsoft knows the whole code base of the Windows operating system anymore. Individuals once did, but the operating system is a big ball of code that no single developer knows from end to end.
That was the thought that came to mind when I saw the just-released survey on Linux Kernel Development from the Linux Foundation. The survey provides an exhaustive and fascinating glimpse at what it describes as one of the largest cooperative software projects ever attempted.