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Who Wrote, and Paid For, 2.6.20
Corbet writes "LWN.net did some data mining through the kernel source repository and put together an analysis of where the patches came from. It turns out that most kernel code is contributed by people paid to do the work — but the list of companies sponsoring kernel development has a surprise or two." The article's conclusion: "The end result of all this is that a number of the widely-expressed opinions about kernel development turn out to be true. There really are thousands of developers — at least, almost 2,000 who put in at least one patch over the course of the last year. Linus Torvalds is directly responsible for a very small portion of the code which makes it into the kernel. Contemporary kernel development is spread out among a broad group of people, most of whom are paid for the work they do. Overall, the picture is of a broad-based and well-supported development community."
No matter how little code he contributes, Linux will always be Linus' baby.
All hail the Benevolent Dictator For Life! o/
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
...did neither contribute nor pay?! Strange...
I find it interesting just how much was contributed by paid devs. It makes sense when you consider that some companies probably would like to see linux able to replace windows completely in the office, and paying devs to help create a more usable linux could well be a money saver in the long run. It should be interesting to see if this trends upward over the next few releases.
TFA: "It is not uncommon to see Linux referred to as a volunteer-created system, as opposed to the corporate-sponsored, proprietary alternatives. There has been little research, however, into how much work on Linux is truly 'volunteer' - done on a hacker's spare, unpaid time. In general, the assumption that Linux is created by volunteers is simply accepted."
Thing is, even though some of those changes were done by programmers in the course of their paid jobs, isn't the work still being "volunteered," albeit by the company rather than an individual? As companies, Red Hat, IBM, Novell, or Big Roy's Heating and Plumbing don't need to help improve the kernel, nor are they directly paid for their work on it. They simply do so because a better Linux kernel does benefit them directly or indirectly, as do many individual volunteers.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Linux doesn't support floppy tape anymore... ftape got removed...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
It was pretty interesting reading this article, I was rather shocked to see that there was no mention of code contributed to M$ (joke for you ms fan boys)
Actually in all seriousness, I didn't realise how much of the code was contributed by companies, I was fairly suprised to see broadcom had donated so much code, since I have had quite a few problems with getting their hardware working on linux in the past. I don't know if this is a new thing for them to be contributing code to get their hardware working better, or if this just bad luck on my part that their hardware never seems to work for me on my boxes.
All in all an interesting read.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
It's really quite interesting the amount of funding that is sent in the direction of the devs working on the Linux kernel. I'm curious what would happen if the funding was spontaneously cut. Linux was built from scratch and supported for free back in the day, but would the main developers continue to work or even be interested at all if they weren't being paid?
...the list of companies sponsoring kernel development has a surprise or two.... a number of the widely-expressed opinions about kernel development turn out to be true.
So... the surprise is that there is no surprise?
Best Windows Freeware
It is just confirmation of old statement that GPL(v2) provides better (at moment best) ground for cooperation between vendors.
Many companies are willing to control what OS does with their software and hardware - and Linux gives them that chance on cheap. But even more so, GPL allows Linux to "merge" back possible code base "forks". That's next to impossible with BSD licensed code most tend to keep closed.
Let's just hope Linux would be able to go on surviving the "snowball" effect of the merges.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Often it's not that the employers dedicate staff to work on the kernel. It's that they hit a snag and contribute the time so they can go about using the kernel.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
At this point, Linus is the head maintainer of Linux 2.6, so the majority of the work he does is accepting patches, arguing in the mailing lists, and talking with the other main programmers and "sub-maintainers" (I don't know if they get a special name or anything).
He doesn't need to write code for the kernel to be important at this point. Besides, he contributes code to other things like git (an SCM) and GNOME.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Anyone know who Secretlab is? Certainly a cool company name.
This guy's the limit!
*puts on tinfoil hat* The unknown on the list is actualy Microsoft employees inserting microsoft code. *removes tinfoil hat*
I often have trouble remembering which way is out of bed in the morning.
I work in government, and talk with RedHat and IBM all the time about linux. When the article summary touted "a few surprises," I thought, "RedHat and IBM aren't the biggest contributors?" Turns out there was no surprise, after all...they're the top attributable contributors. Is anyone else surprised by this?
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
RedHat, Novell and IBM all have dedicated staffs that do nothing but work on the Linux kernel. These are the only companies I know of for sure, but they are also at the top of those contributor lists.
My blog
... that "corporate America" takes so much bashing on /., and Linux (which is deified in these same boards) is so dependent on those same evil capitalist entities for its very survival. This brings to mind the old catch-phrase "biting the hand that feeds you", doesn't it?
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Your poster did not like the author's odd reluctance to use the word "I".
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
But that would make it non-infringing code...
No more ftape? Say it ain't so?
The "Microsoft Rules!" comments in the source code don't count.
dont forget about the university students who submit patches as part of their CS studies.
What's interesting is the amount of code by corporate contributors such as Astaro, Tensilica, Secretlab, NetXen and others that we normally don't hear about. While certainly a bit of those are driver work - but I'm certainly happy to see the participation. And, yes.. even Sony dropped in some PS3 platform code.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
It's a shame they didn't contribute the firmware for their wireless cards.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
From TFA
Finding an answer to that question is somewhat trickier than looking at who wrote the patches, mostly because very few developers say "I wrote this on behalf of my employer." The approach taken by your editor was relatively simplistic, but, perhaps, the best that is practical. Any patch whose author's given email address indicates a corporate affiliation is assumed to have been developed by an employee of that corporation. So any patch posted by somebody with an ibm.com email address is accounted as having been done by an IBM employee.
While I still find the result interesting, and while I also would like to know which organizations contribute the most to the kernel, I don't know that this method is really a good way to reflect whether the work was done in a "sponsored" fashion.
That is, just because someone's email address shows that they're from IBM, doesn't necessarily mean that they were being paid by IBM to explicitly work on the kernel. For all we know, they might have "15 minutes of real, actual work" like this guy and are just hacking away in their cube because they're bored. Maybe not, but still, for he purpose of determining which companies contribute most (or the individuals motivations to contribute), that seems like a shaky method of proving or disproving things.
It seems they got paid for what they were asked to do.
Oh, wait, they've been busy with Vista.
... fucked up the libata SATA drivers. There's a deadlock that some of us have been hitting, but I have no idea what it is.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
And this is one of the problems associated with open source: Many people get paid to do work, but the work they are paid to do is not kernel development for the open source community. That is, some developers are paid to develop software for Big Company and they end up using the knowledge gained there on the companies dime to develop open source on the side. So Big Company gets pissy when their proprietary technology makes its way into open source and lawsuits have arose due to this.
On the other hand, if you are using your work email address for things you are doing that have nothing to do with the company, you are just asking for trouble.
I'm sure there are some that weren't 'sponsored', but for the most part, I think it's a pretty safe assumption to make.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Sure, it's not guaranteed accurate. In fact, the article actually mentions this caveat in the next paragraph:
The surprise is how twisted this study is. The author ignored the opinion of authors to concentrate on email addresses and the main conclusion is that 65% of kernel developers have a job. That people able to contribute to the Linux kernel would have a job is not much of a surprise. Ignoring the opinion of those you are trying to study is.
So, let me quote all the relevent sections to back up what I have said.
The statistics are all very nice, but the conclusion is forced. I'd go with the opinion of the authors themselves, code is still not being written on behalf of companies.
That's an unfortunate conclusion and things are changing. When free software takes the place of non free, the entire mechanism now "supporting" M$ and others will switch to free software authorship. When that happens hardware makers will step up to the plate with free drivers and contribute significant code. Many already do this. User feedback will still be important and of high quality, so the actual distribution of "this code paid for by Broadcom" vrs, "this code from Broadcom fixed by 101 happy users" is still hard for someone like me to predict.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
not if microsoft can hid its roll in the addition of the code.
I often have trouble remembering which way is out of bed in the morning.
I find the amount contributed by Red Hat very disturbing, considering they are selling an abortion of Linux, the instability of Fedora, and general lack of adherence to standards.
The end result of this trend could be very bad for the future of Linux and good for Red Hat's profits. In their case the two are definitely mutually exclusive.
You sir are why I disapprove of unlicensed breeding.
Snags could include things like "driver not working" to "driver not present/existing", etc. Snag doesn't mean "Linus is a shit head, fucked up the kernel and now I gotsta fix it." Snag just means something that isn't working yet.
If you look at a lot of non-distro patches, they're from people who ran into some problem or another.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That, or some salaries could be used for a tax write-off, or goodwill/PR. I've heard of it happening every now and then.
C|N>K
Should point out they fix a lot of bugs reported externally. But obviously my comment meant for those who don't supply linux distros, like Broadcom, Atmel, and the like.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Aw, comeon bro. This is by far one of the most interesting articles I've seen here in some time. The statistics bear out so many important implications for linux and OSS in general. Did you mean Elmer FUDD by chance? If so, maybe the conlusion we can draw from this release now that it's finalized is "West and wewaxation at wast! ah hu hu hu hu"
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Aren't they are a for profit company? I thought that will all of the Ubuntu users that they would be supporting some kernel development?
The cool thing about this situation is that the OS does not pop up a banner ad every time a piece of code from IBM is used. You do not have to click through a number of pages acknowledging the work that each company contributed. Simply because so much of the contributions are annonymous indicates that this is truly a volunteer effort.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Often it's not easy to relay this distinction to management, as they're mostly interested with the bottom line of how much would it cost to implement x solution compared to the cost of implementing y solution. They mostly don't have time or don't care about the politics underlying either deployment unless they have received a directive that "our shop uses y solution. period."
Do you have a copy of your parents' breeding license prominently displayed or do you merely inject oppressive language about others into random statements? I fail to understand how your single disagreement with a view of another person lessens their worth as a human being.
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
...The darkest secret that Microsoft and other software companies don't want the rest of the world to know.
Companies are shelling out billions of dollars each year just to run some software that needs to be renewed, updated and purchased again and again and again.
Some companies are investing their workers or their donations into the community software projects because in some way, it will truly benefit them in a way that will not expire the way proprietary software does. So when people start noticing that businesses do more than just "use" F/OSS, but they contribute to it in a way that makes it more usable for themselves. And depending on the way they contribute, they can also write off some on their taxes as part of a tax strategy.
So companies can spend their software budget in a way the keeps them locked in and paying ridiculous annual fees and subscriptions, or they can actually pay to get the software they actually want in the way they want it, benefit themselves, benefit the public and even build a lot of good will in various communities.
I am hopeful to see the rest of the F/OSS revolution in my life time...
Many patches are fed in through email lists etc where the maintainer (more likely to be a "named person") picks it up and pushes it upstream. I expect many volunteers will be in that group.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Forced"? I thought it was an interesting study. At least the author went trough the all the trouble of quantifying individual contributions, calculating against the overall kernel codebase, etc. What have you done for Linux lately other than obviously bitch and FUD about "M$" on Slashdot all day with all your sockpuppet accounts?
No one understands it that way, except obviously yourself. The GPL ensures that is not and will never be the case. That's the point. Why do you weasel this into the discussion?
You just cannot help yourself, can you? What does Microsoft have to do with all this?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
What about Canonical? Everyone loves Ubuntu, but it doesn't look like they're contributing to the kernel.
In most development shops I've worked for, programmers of Chinese-descent have always made huge contributions. I'd estimate that 25 to 50% of developers (in the places I've worked) have had Chinese names. But there are hardly any Chinese names in this report. That surprised me.
NEC does too, or at least they used to.
I guess the work done by the NSA on SELinux is so secret that they are not listed... ;)
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I notice Intel makes a fairly large contribution. Since AMD and ATI have gotten together recently, it would be nice to see some major contributions by them. That would benefit Linux quite a bit.
I like how it doesn't mention which kernel they're talking about. It mentioned Linus's name, but doesn't mention the Linux Kernel.
I couldn't help noticing that there don't appear to be any female names in TFA.
Is the IT industry really so gender biased? And would Linux be better (less geeky perhaps) if more females were involved?
Your attitude is infectious...
Wouldn't it be cool if those lists were dynamically updated. We could all submit useless kernel patches to game the list and try to get on top. :)
Why is there an Apple section here that generally shows a positive bias toward that company? Apple is member of "corporate America", right?
/.ers don't bash it.
I suspect that we don't see the same type of vilification of Apple as we see extended toward other corporate entities (like Microsoft or SONY) because Apple has traditionally held a minority share in their ventures and rarely has the opportunity to abuse the marketplace.
Oh yeah, Google has a section in which it enjoys a lot of praise while also being a member of "corporate America". In this case I suspect it is because Google hasn't been abusing their position, so
Hint: it's not that the individual companies are incorporated, it's that they're bullies.
Hey, it could be worse, at least Microsoft wasn't on the list of companies.
Code produced by women sometimes slips into the source tree, but is specifically purged from the kernel by a team of highly trained misogynists (jointly funded by IBM and RedHat). It's a well known fact that women have brains shaped like prams and are therefore unable to contribute kernel code of sufficient quality (especially during the 'time of the month'). Women have however, applied thier pretty little heads to the serious shortcomings in glibc's shopping(5c), makeup(3) and gossip(7) interfaces. They really are treasures you know.
For research to be valid, the assumptions need to be founded in truth. I'm not sure all these are.
My biggest problem is assuming everyone submitting code with an @ibm.com email address is being paid for their development. Looked at a different perspective from the author:
if there are 2,000 people contributing patches in the last year, where do you think people with the kind of experience and capabilities to patch the kernel will work? 7-eleven?
There is one conclusion you can take, a portion smaller than 35% of the patches come from people who are unemployed. And that's only if the author's other assumptions are correct.
Granted the broadcomm stuff, RedHat, these are probably M-F folks, but not necessarily, I think that's a jump that costs these results.
On the contrary. I would say it's quite easy to prove. Now, I'm not going to cite any scientific study, because I don't know if there has been one on this subject. However, that does not make the inherent selfishness of all human beings something that is not easy to prove.
Try this exercise: Get permission to visit your local preschool or Kindergarten over the course of a week. While there just sit quietly and record the number of times the children are reminded to share, versus the number of times they are instructed that they don't have to share. (Examples, "Billy, share the finger paints with Sally." vs "Billy, it's Ok, you don't have to share the finger paints, Sally has her own." I GUARANTEE you that the children will be reminded to share FAR more times than they will be stopped from sharing.
Selfishness is a basic Human trait. It's part of our nature to think of ourselves first, and it is very rare indeed when people will honestly do something for others out of no desire for themselves at all. At the very least they will be looking for the "Warm Fuzzy". People are motivated almost exclusively by selfish motives. This is why Communism and Socialism don't work. They try and go against human selfishness.
This is why Capitalism DOES work, it harnesses human selfishness (we call it Enlightened Self Interest) for the greater good of all. This is also why Open Source works so well. It is a very pure form of Capitalism, almost a meritocracy. It's also why so many big companies are involved. It's in their own selfish best interests to improve the Linux code base, so they volunteer (IE: Don't charge anyone) their programmer's time to improve it so they can improve their own bottom lines down the road. Think of it as Investment Volunteerism.
Enlightened Self Interest: Good for you, me, and Linux.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Has anyone considered using this info for a tv commercial? Ex:
What happens when RedHat, IBM, Montevista, sony, HP, SGI, .... Get together to write software?
Linux Happens!
This is not a flame, it is an honest cry out for some sanity, with a little frustration in the mix.
..point releases :(
/somewhat/ now but there needs to be a little more work done to make sure that good design procedures and good programming practices are met. They certainly are not today :( the number of things that would get you an F in basic programming 101 that come my way on the tiny portion of the kernel I have to deal with every day is almost unbelievable.
Does there really need to be 2000 people working on the kernel?
Is the fact that tiny tiny pieces of the kernel are being hacked at by so many uncorrellated developers to be blamed for why "Stable" 2.6 kernel line has had so many terrible ABI breakages?
A kernel is not "stable" when the the USB init structure has new function pointers jammed into the middle of it between two
Who really oversees all this and why are they allowing such things to happen? They days are fast dwindling where complete world recompiles being required for every point release are acceptable. The 2.6 line has been the most "unstable" line of kernels ever, not in day to day running but in point to point consistancy.
The constant updates to the kernel are not helping either as auto-updates to a lot of distros then cull out any third party drivers that HAD been installed. This makes adding a piece of hardware to your system that is not supported by your distro and keeping it running is a constant battle. We are reaching a point where casual uses of Linux get to choose from the supported hardware devices that their distro provides and NOTHING ELSE.
The kernel is a too important to be handled in the cavalier manner that it is today. A consortiom need to take control, patch submissions need to be FULLY vetted before being included. Sure they are
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
It got removed because it was old, buggy, and no one cared. Quite a number of kernel releases went by (6 I believe?) during which ftape never worked. No one wrote in to say this mattered. No one stepped up to fix the subsystem. The users (you included) apparently were completely silent on the matter.
Granted you might not have installed a new linux kernel in the past 6 months (or more?), or might not have actually used your tape writer in the same interval, so might not have been a position to notice the situation. But the fact that no one cared enough to raise the issue spoke volumes. And so it was axed.
I'm sure if someone steps up to the plate and says "I want to forward port the ftapd driver to the current kernel release and continue to maintain it" and provides patches, that they will be accepted. If that hardware is truly valuable to you, please do seek to let the world know.
Most ftape devices are not useful to most people by now, because they are too slow, too unreliable, and too small capacity. Other larger faster formats have become available, and alternatives to tape have become available such that the aging ftape devices are not interesting to most people. Add to this that tape isn't a very good archival format and you quickly see the dwindling market for such devices. But the 2.4 kernel is still maintained. Ftape works there, I believe, so you can continue to back up your data with Linux.
-josh
The implication is that they could and should, and that the inavailability of such a program is unfortunate. See, I can deal with folks whose opinions I disagree with, should they be willing to express those opinions in a reasonable and civil manner. Providing an opinion in such a way as to be generally disrespectful to one's readership base without providing argument or evidence, on the other hand, is indeed indicative of a level of general incivility which, at large, can reasonably be attributed to deficiencies within the valueset largely provided in childhood. In any event, disparaging individuals who engage in antisocial behavior can serve the societally useful goal of making it clear that behaving in such a manner is not acceptable within a community's norms.
My wife and I are doing the paperwork to begin the process of providing a foster home. My interest in the undertaking is largely predicated on receiving the training and experience necessary for quality parenting while having an escape mechanism available. There are plenty of people in the world; raising more should only be done if one has a substantial certainty as to one's ability to do a substantially better-than-average job.
Getting back towards the topic -- a substantial component of my job is doing open source work; in previous employment, it's been 100%. I know a nontrivial number of paid folks who do OSS work (far more than I know in person who work purely uncompensated... actually, I can't think of any of those IRL who could be classified as serious), and have long been surprised with the widespread perception that it's primarily an amateur activity. From my perspective, then, these findings are in no way a surprise.
IBM doesn't supply Linux distros, except for the fact that they sell some servers preloaded with SuSE.
My blog
Some people become assholes no matter how their parents tried to raise them.
Not that I'm comparing "super parenting" with "super breeding" (and any unintended colloquial baggage), but if this was indeed mandated and abided by the public at large I fear we would wind up with a generation in which no one would be willing to mop the floors. Say what you will about your own moral superiority, but if everyone was of the same mindset, I think you would find that the world would slowly but surely become boring (and quite filthy) to live in.
I do, however, salute you and your wife for your ambitions of trying to improve another's situation in the early stages of life experience - quite noble, indeed!
Your aforementioned widespread perception is very much realized in the upper management level. A study such as does provide useful ammunition to fight uninformed opinion, but doesn't expose the crux of the issue, coming across more like a "Who's who" list that won't amount to anything other than impressing the parents of the process.
I would like to see more analysis of the reasoning for the "paid" contributions from the mindset of the underwriters themselves. No doubt it would be fascinating and might prod a thought or two in the gray matter of those disparaging CTO and CIOs.
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
After clicking on the link to the comment above I have to sleep on the couch.
Indeed -- it would be interesting, for that matter, to know how far up the management chain the decision to release such contributions typically extends. In OSS-centric businesses (my aforementioned prior employer was MontaVista) this is unquestionably well-known to all; in other places, however, I've seen decisions to contribute made closer to the ground floor as a matter of practicality (avoiding the need to spend future man-hours to port an internally-developed bugfix or extension to future 3rd-party releases -- or hoping for 3rd-party extensions to a piece of internally-developed infrastructure unrelated to a company's core focus). That said, my employment history tends towards smaller, younger, software-oriented businesses; others may differ (perhaps in having policies requiring closer oversight by Legal?).
HP also have dedicated staff
I think the instability you're referring to may be caused by the decision keep on adding features to the 'stable' kernel. e.g. new relatively experimental stuff is being added to the 2.6 kernel rather than a 2.7 kernel. I've heard this mentioned before and being blamed on Linus being reluctant to fork the current kernel as it would mean lots of complicated bug-fixes would have to be backported to the 2.6 kernel. The implication is that just adding to the 2.6 kernel makes linus's life easier but the 2.6 kernel less stable.
For some users, open source is definitely about private property. I can't feel like I own something unless I have the opportunity to control what it does. When I can examine and change the source code for the operating system and all the other programs on my computer, I have the opportunity to change any of the computer's behavior that I don't like. I personally haven't taken advantage of that opportunity because I have been happy enough with the way Linux operates. I could, though, if any of the corporate paid Linux developers started inserting code that put their corporation's agenda ahead of my own. They also know that I could, so I don't expect tham to trouble me.
There are many reasons why a person or a corporation might want to use or contribute to Linux. For me, it is the chance to own my computer in a way that I can't with a proprietary operating system. If I should feel inclined, one day, to actually write some code, I will contribute it under the GPL, to potentially be added to all the other GPLed code. Such a contribution would deny me the opportunity to call the code my private property and try to tell people to pay me for it, but it would help other people to own their computers, just as they have helped me to own mine. The only alternatives I can imagine to such cooperation are to use a proprietary operating system, or to write my own from scratch. I find neither of those to be palatable.
Suspicions verified. Linux is subsidized by large corporations.
;) Yes, there are commercial distros, and yes, they do throw money at the kernel. I personally don't have any problem with Linus being a millionaire...he's earned it, as far as I'm concerned.
:)
Mission accomplished because you killed off the little guy in the market.
My refutation of this is distrowatch.com.
Don't like corporate distros though? Fine...download Debian, Blag, Gentoo, or Sorceror, (to name but a few) and be happy.
You fail to understand the issue here. In this context, "stuff not working" doesn't necessarily mean "Y does it already but we need to fix X to do it", but rather "neither X nor Y do it, and we have to implement it in one of them". Consider companies like Broadcom or Atmel or Sony. They do Linux work either to create drivers for their new hardware, or to port Linux to their new platform. Sony, for example, did a lot of work on the last couple of releases because they added support for their Cell platform. Interestingly, that's why a lot of these companies do their work on Linux in the first place. It costs Sony or Broadcom a lot less to port Linux to their new platform than it would to work out a licensing agreement for Windows and then port that!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...