Microsoft dropped a mini-bombshell on Monday, announcing that it is contributing thousands of lines of code for inclusion in Linux. But lest anyone think Microsoft suffered a massive head trauma over the weekend, the code it is releasing isn't really about helping Linux compete better with Microsoft. The drivers are really geared at making Windows a better host for Linux.

4,273,291 lines of code, that's the size of the KDE core modules, which are released as the official KDE software distribution, as of today.

While it might seem a little of a mundane task, counting the lines of code in your programming projects can be a useful thing to do, and provides you with interesting statistics. Cloc is a Perl script written to allow you to do just that.

The official KDE Project currently consists of 4.2 million lines of code. Cornelius Schumacher has applied the lines to individual projects and published the stats.

orporations hold a ton of open source code behind their firewalls, and Jim Whitehurst wants to extract it. The Red Hat CEO knows whereof he speaks. Before joining the company he was at Delta Air Lines. In introducing the subject Matt Asay called this code waste. Which gave me a clever idea. Don’t think of these as corporate code contributions. Think of it as code recycling.

2.6.29 is made up of 11,010,647 lines of code, with the number of developers who contributed to it reaching a record high of 1,166. Unlike the lines of code that make up the kernel, the number of developers has not been constantly climbing.

After the release of Linux 2.6.27, kernel developers are currently busily integrating patches for the next kernel version into the main development branch of Linux. This usually involves discarding some old code and adding new code though on balance, there are usually more new lines than old ones, making the kernel grow continually.

Now that Microsoft has submitted 20,000 lines of code for inclusion in the kernel, they are either Super Cool or Watch Your Back!, depending on who you listen to. So what's the real story?

"...What’s really amazing is the wise Emacs internal architecture that allows those myriads of extensions to work together. Eclipse tries hard to achieve this, and the concept of plugin extension points is really similar to “hooks” in Emacs, but… But it’s almost impossible to write a useful Eclipse extension with just a few lines of Java code—too many low-level overhead.