Contributing to an open source project isn’t restricted to programmers…there are plenty of other activities that regular users can do like testing, documentation and the like.

Bryce says in his post that, from his experience, the proportion of Windows users to contributors was substantially lower.

From that, I suggested that if a lot of Windows users move over to Linux, as the community seems to be aiming for, the ratio of contributors to users would likely be much reduced. If the ratio is reduced then that will have a number of consequences for a lot of projects not least among them a lot of ex-Windows users not very politely asking for support and expecting it pretty damn quick.

I think your hypothesis has no foundation. According to recent studies, most developers work on Windows for their day jobs … and thus have a greater familiarity with it. Wouldn’t that mean that the most fertile ground for recruiting new, skilled developers into the open source movement would to recruit Windows developers?

To say that the people most willing and best able to contribute to Open Source are already contributing… is kind of like saying that the people most willing and able to be professional programmers already are. Just because that’s true, doesn’t mean that there aren’t thousand or even millions of others that are out there trying to learn how, going through schools all over the world with the intention of becoming programmers.

Ultimately, the Open Source development model (aka movement/community/paradigm, etc) is just like any other development model: it has to fight for brain-share, it has to work to convince new (and old) programmers that it’s way is the best way, and it has to grow — or it will die.