~1350 Rails core contributors

As part of the work I am doing for my opening keynote for the forthcoming Conferencia Rails 2008 I've written a script to approximate the number of people that has contibuted to Rails so far.

This is not a trivial count because when the Rails repo was under Subversion there were just some conventions to give credit to people in changelogs or commit messages. In addition people were given credit by their name, nickname, email, whatever. There were typos... it was all manual. Now under Git this is more systematic.

So the script tries to extract names from those places, and uses a hand-maintained mapping that normalizes names which has received a great deal of input from the Rails community.

After some days the figure has stabilized around 1350 people, which I think is really impressive and says a lot about the agility of Rails as an open-source project. This is the current listing.