From the 'Open to Code' files:

There are a lot of different metrics to validate the health of an open source project. In my opinion, one of the most critical is the number of different code authors.

The open source OpenStack cloud platform this week has crossed a key threshold in that regard, now boasting 1,006 different source code authors (from the period of may 2010 to June 3, 2013).

Huzzah! That's a non-trivial accomplishment.

Just for some comparison though, the Linux kernel (a larger and older project) passed 7,800 developers in 2012.

Drilling down into the data that OpenStack (true to its nature) keeps very open - in the last month alone there were 313 unique authors and 2,512 code commits. In total aggregate lines of code that translates into 914,334 lines of code that were added and 429,700 lines of code that were removed.

Earlier this year, at the time of the Grizzly release, stats were available that detailed where the contributions were coming from. For the Grizzly release, Red Hat topped the list, with 836 commits across core OpenStack projects and 1,854 commits across all OpenStack projects. Red Hat developers added 121,632 lines code and remove 87,145 lines of code.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.