French-based commercial open source portal vendor eXo recently used a blog post to announce that they have almost 100 active contributors. According to the blog, eXo now has more active contributors than most other open source projects, including familiar ones such as JBoss Application Server and Mozilla Firefox

Tracking the number of contributors can be a relevant indicator of the health of a product development community, but looking behind the numbers reveals a slightly  less positive impression.

With 85 employees, most of which are developers, the majority of the contributors happens to be on the eXo payroll.As I mentioned back in July eXo is in rapid growth mode and has many new hires. I would argue that if you deduct the eXo employees from the numbers, it would seem like there are very few contributors left from "the community," and as a buyer that is not necessarily a good thing.

With many government customers and a global footprint, I suspect that eXo, unlike other commercial open source vendors, has not been as badly hit by the current financial crisis.  But despite their enthusiam, their community has some way to go.