> 
>>>    git log -500 --format="%ae" | grep -vP
>>> "@\S*(redhat|arm|suse|google|gnu|adacore|alibaba|intel|ibm|apple|linaro|huaw
>>> ei|c
>>> odesourcery|golang|sony|amd|chromium|nvidia|loongson|accesssoftek|ubisoft|mi
>>> cros
>>> oft|fb|energize|comstyle|nextsilicon|quicinc|azul|gentoo|graphcore|gdcprojec
>>> t|si
>>> five)\.(org|com|de|cz|cn)" | sort -u | wc -l
>>> 
>>> Results are:
>>> * GCC as of commit 445d8da5fbd: 15
>>> * Clang as of commit 7b201bfcac2: 49
>>> 
>>> This is some pretty big difference! If I expand the commits range, the
>>> difference increases further.
>> 
>> GCC is alive for 33 years, so I think your theory eats dust.  Many of
>> the GCC and GDB developers get paid for their work, but that doesn't
>> mean the project is less viable, and the long history of both GCC and
>> GDB is the proof.
> 
> Okay, let me say beforehand that both GCC and Clang are very active projects
> right now. Just in case, so there's no misunderstanding.
> 
> So, times are changing. In older times there were no standard to development,
> Git was not as popular, development practices are varied too. So, as long you
> could get your patch to a project, any odd contribution requirements were fine,
> they hardly would set a barrier.
> 
> But these days Git got over all other VCSes (and for a reason), so using SVN or
> Perforce, or whatever, is a barrier to contribution. 12 years ago Github was
> founded, and then also the open-source clone Gitlab appeared. These two pretty
> much set the standard development model nowadays (for a reason too). There still
> are projects that use other models, but this is a barrier to contributors.
> 
> What I'm getting at is that your reasoning that since GCC is 33 years old it
> will live on does not work. For a project to "live on" it needs to be active.
> Sure GCC is active! But its activity mainly stems from paid people and
> maintainers. Whereas in Clang a large chunk of it stems from contributors. Let
> me repeat, paid people come and go, so do maintainers (they may burn out, or
> just move on). These contributors are the ones who will become new maintainers
> and the ones who advertise the project in their environment.
> 
> I hope it makes clear the future of what project looks brighter.

I think the point is not “this works for a long time and it must be better than new stuff” but rather the current method _can_ live long (proven by gcc & gdb, etc). If in the future people moves to other shiny new SVN’s and github’s, does the git method still work? 

Yuan