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

SCO?

[fluch]

...did neither contribute nor pay?! Strange...

Re:SCO?

[Poppler]

Luckily, Sony appears to be a major contributer. Look's like we'll FINALLY see their rootkit ported to Linux.

Define "volunteer."

[Rob T Firefly]

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.

Re:Define "volunteer."

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Define "volunteer."

[Anonymous Coward]

not in any sense derived from Pointless Nerd Hairsplitting.

Oh, sorry, I thought this was SlashDot.

Re:Define "volunteer."

[prelelat]

I don't agree with your standpoint. I do think that IBM Oracle and other companies benifit from this kind of program. On the other hand most people benifit in some way from contributing code to linux in the first place. People use it for experiance to get a job, to make the OS that they run better, to be apart of something and make themselves feel better. Just because a company is volenteering programmers to the cause because its benifiting them doesn't mean its not volenteering. Its like saying donating to linux because you want it to work better for you so that you can produce more money is not really a donation.

Most people donate, volenteer for something because they know it will benifit them in the end(how many people at Harvard who have volenteering on their application to the school volenteered because it was something they wanted to do, I would guess half does that make their time in a soup kitchen less valuable or appreciated?). This doesn't mean that its any less noble in the end.

Re:Define "volunteer."

[morgan_greywolf]

Exactly. Most of the driver development in the early days were done by people who -- gasp, shock -- had that particular piece of hardware and needed it to work with the Linux kernel. Much driver development is *still* done that way, although some driver work is now sponsored by companies who develop the hardware (i.e., Broadcom)

Most everyone working on the kernel has an agenda and that's okay -- open source isn't about communism or pure philanthropy, it's more of a libertarian or anarchocapitalist philosophy.

Re:Define "volunteer."

[VWJedi]

The term "volunteer" in our culture generally carries implications of altruism rather than self interest.

If you put it that way, no one is a "volunteer developer" for linux. They write / change code for their own benefit (to add features, improve functionality). Once they've finished, they usually give their code to "the linux community", but the reason they do the work in the first place is because they want to fix / improve the way their system runs.

Quite a paradox

[L. VeGas]

...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?

GPL vs. BSD

[ThePhilips]

Overall, the picture is of a broad-based and well-supported development community.

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.

Re:GPL vs. BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't you merge changes back to BSD-licensed code?

Because when Microsoft makes ftp.exe using BSD-licensed code, all they have to do is tell people that it had BSD-licensed code, not give them the code nor the changes they made. Or, take a look at the various commercial forks of postgres that add replication, live backups, or whatever. Sure, it'd be nice if they gave these features back to the postgresql database server, but the developers chose the BSD license knowing that the people who do stuff with the code don't have to give back.

This is why the GPL makes code Free, while the BSD license makes programmers Free.

Re:Fairly Interesting Overview

[LWATCDR]

Why is it shocking. Red Hat, IBM, and Novell hope to make a lot of money from Linux.
Then you have the expensive systems that use Linux
Intel and HP are still hopping that the Itantium will work out in the end and frankly Linux is the big OS for the Itantium. Not to many hobbiest have an Itantium sitting around so Intel and HP probably contribute a lot of code for the Itantium port.
IBM sells a lot of Power systems that run Linux so they probably contributed a lot of code to support the new Power6. Not to mention the the 360/370/Zmachine port.
Then you have Mips contributing for the embedded market.
Linux is now big business.

Re:BDFL

[JensenDied]

where does open source mean unpaid?

Re:BDFL

[the_womble]

No, it proves that open source is a good business model that is becoming widely accepted.

Incidentally, why is this supposed to be news - I thought that any one who knew anything about open source knew this, and that only stupid journalists get it wrong

The analysis is broken

[EmbeddedJanitor]

These are only the submitters, not necessarily the actual authors of the changes.

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.