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Who Wrote, and Paid For, 2.6.20

Posted by kdawson on from the names-and-companies dept.

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."

4 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Project Maintainers don't write much code... by jZnat · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.'
  2. Re:Define "volunteer." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    They mean "volunteer" in the sense that's completely obvious from the context, not in any sense derived from Pointless Nerd Hairsplitting.

  3. Re:Interesting how much was conributed by paid dev by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  4. Re:GPL vs. BSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    So they will gladly take any change anybody makes to the application under GPL, but they will license that bunch of code out to anybody who pays *them*. The people who extend and improve MySQL with GPL code don't see a dime, while MySQL makes a nice profit.
    This is not strictly true. It would be a violation of copyright law for TrollTech or MySQL AB to take GPL code written by other people and release it under a different license without permission. Therefore, they can't "gladly take any change anyone makes". The law doesn't permit it.

    I don't know how Trolltech handle this, but MySQL AB only takes changes where the contributor has specifically, deliberately, explictly, and knowingly signed over their copyright to the company with the deliberate goal of permitting them to profit from it.

    Don't like it? You can make any change you like to the program under the GPL, and not sign away your rights - and the company can't touch your changes.

    IMHO that isn't really the coolest behavior, which is why I avoid Qt and MySQL.
    Well, it's your loss if your ignorance is leading you to mistakenly avoid some decent software.

    (Unless you actually take the position that people shouldn't be allowed to knowingly and deliberately choose to sign away their copyright - in which case you might like to give some thought to the meaning of the word "freedom".)