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."

Comments

Intellectual Property

[s31523]

It turns out that most kernel code is contributed by people paid to do the work
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.

Re:GPL vs. BSD

[mrsbrisby]

For example, is IBM or HP one day going to submit a patch that brings some sort of DRM into the kernel?

The fact that no one is writing up an analysis for one of the BSDs doesn't mean they do not benefit from the same type of contributions.

No, it means that nobody cares. Work on the *BSDs is charity work.

In many ways corporations are more amenable to BSD.

BSD culture and development wouldn't change in the slightest if the *BSDs were in the public domain because corporations like the attribution and advertising clauses.

I met a sales guy who sold 60,000$US imaging systems on the promise that they weren't a four man shop but instead- "had licensed all this software and intellectual property" blah blah blah- which made them seem a lot bigger than they were.

The real fact is that in the long-term, BSD benefits the dishonest and amoral. If consumers realized this, they might avoid doing business with dishonest companies.