How many developers are funded to work on LibreOffice?

How many software developers, in terms of full-time position equivalents, are funded to work on LibreOffice?

  • I’m asking both about The Document Foundation and elsewhere.
  • If you only know about some organization which funds people to work on LO, that’s a useful partial answer I suppose.

I don’t know. Most development/maintenance programming will be done by volunteers. There are, however, also a few “employees”.
I would assume that firms/organizations delegating/funding full-time employees to the project will also be represented in the EngineeringSteeringCommittee of TheDocumentFoundation. (ESC) You find more information here.

It is not that easy. Companies do not fund developers for LibreOffice directly, but the developers of the companies are paid for working for the customers of the company. If LibreOffice is part of that work, then they will contribute their patches to the community.

If you look at the logs in the code repository and at the mail addresses of the authors you will find companies and persons which often contribute. I count about thirty employees from that for the last month (and about fifty individuals). libreoffice/core - main, development code repository

Besides the mentioned ESC, you can look at the Advisory Board. Advisory Board | The Document Foundation - The House of LibreOffice and Document Liberation Project

The Document Foundation does not employ developers for LibreOffice. TDF employs people to maintain the infrastructure and for running the foundation and strengthen the community. Sometimes the TDF makes a tender for a topic and companies can apply for it. Tenders Archives - The Document Foundation Blog

In addition, you should consider, that there are individuals who contribute not so often and in their spare time, but nevertheless have a deep knowledge in the code. And you should consider, that not only improving the code, but translations, quality assistance and marketing are essential for the success of LibreOffice too.

Providing a number is probably impossible, as there are developers employed to work full time on LibreOffice by several companies in many geographies (and only a percentage is active in the community). On average, there are over 250 devs active on a yearly basis and over 75 active on a monthly basis, so we can estimate around 50 full time paid devs, 100 either volunteers active on a regular basis or full time paid on a project basis, and 100 pure volunteers active when they have time and motivation. Of course, the numbers may change, but statistics have been extremely consistent over the last 3/4 years (after 3/4 years of growing numbers, following the birth of the project). You can find an independent source of infos at http://www.openhub.net.