Many people assume that Linux is a system written by a few geeks.

Well, it's not just a few, as a recent statistic by LWN.net shows. It lists a mere 1961 developers being credited as authors of contributions to the Linux kernel over the last year.

So if some 2000 people have actually got contributions into the Linux kernel (which in turn can be cooperative work, and many changes have been rejected), you can safely assume that the development community looking at the Linux kernel source code is a lot larger.

Over 2000 developers. Thats quite some manpower, you know... and we're talking just kernel here. There are thousands of contributors to GNOME, KDE, Firefox, Openoffice.org, Gimp, ... and all the other, smaller opensource applications. The kernel is probably one of the opensource applications harderst to work with: you're working on the very guts of the operating system. Change something bad and your computer won't boot. It might lose some of your data etc. - if you are e.g. developing for firefox, the worst that can happen is pretty much that your browser crashes or you lose your bookmarks copy.

Also these 2000 aren't just your random geeks. Many of them are working for large companies such as IBM, Intel, Nokia, Oracle, HP, SGI, Broadcom, just to name a few of the big contributing companies who are not known as being a "pure Linux company". But they're working hand in hand across company borders and also with small developers. This is how Linux development happens: distributed, global, across borders: open and with free speech.