The Myth of the Isolated Kernel Hacker

Ant writes "The Linux Foundation's report (PDF) on who writes Linux — "... Linux isn't written by lonely nerds hiding out in their parents' basements. It's written by people working for major companies — many of them businesses that you probably don't associate with Linux. To be exact, while 18.2% of Linux is written by people who aren't working for a company, and 7.6% is created by programmers who don't give a company affiliation, everything else is written by someone who's getting paid to create Linux. From top to bottom, of the companies that have contributed more than 1% of the current Linux kernel, the list looks like this: ..."

Comments

Re:the list Before a karma whore can...

[millwall]

At least attempt to format the list, mate:

      1. Red Hat: 12.3%
      2. IBM: 7.6%
      3. Novell: 7.6%
      4. Intel: 5.3%
      5. Independent consultant: 2.5%
      6. Oracle: 2.4%
      7. Linux Foundation: 1.6%
      8. SGI 1.6%
      9. Parallels 1.3%
    10. Renesas Technology: 1.3%
    11. Academia: 1.2%
    12. Fujitsu: 1.1%
    13. MontaVista: 1.1%
    14. MIPS Technologies: 1.1%
    15. Analog Devices: 1.0%
    16. HP: 1.0%

Re:You know what company is shamefully absent?

[sapphire wyvern]

They're a little bit further down.

The next two rows on the list in TFA are as follows:

17: Freescale 1,375 0.9%
18: Google 1,261 0.9%

I'm not sure why the parent decided to stop where they did.

These rankings are based on number of kernel changes submitted broken down by employer.

However it seems that Google employees are making a significant contribution to Linux project management and quality processes though: Red Hat employees sign off on over 36.4% of changes, which is the highest proportion of sign-offs in the hands of a single company, but Google has second place in that table with 10.5% of all sign-offs. It looks like several Google employees are filling the roles of subsystem maintainers - they may not write as much code as some other companies but they are still contributing some senior people.

Interesting stuff!

Re:GPL good for business

[the_womble]

whether you can start your own for-profit software business if you license your software under the GPL.

Depends on what the alternatives are and what your business model is. Assuming we narrow down the choices to the two best known open source licences (others are broadly similar to one of the other) and proprietary licensing:

• Want to do all the development yourself, distribution yourself, not using GPL licensed libraries, want to make your money from license sales? Proprietary.
• Want to accept community contributions and sell a proprietary version, happy for competitors to use your code, do not need GPL libraries, want others to redistribute? BSD or GPL and persuade contributors to sign over the copyrights, or cleanly separate open and proprietary components and LGPL.
• Do not want to sell a proprietary version, want to use GPL licensed libraries, want to accept outside contributions, want to prevent people from reselling your code without contributing back, want other to distribute? GPL
• Doing all the development yourself, but want to use GPL libraries, want others to redistribute, want to prevent competitors reselling your code without contributing? GPL
• Want to re-assure users that the software will still be around if you go bust? GPL or BSD. Additionally want to stop competitors reselling a proprietary version? GPL.

Obviously this does not cover anything like all the possibilities, but I just want to make the point that there are business reasons for every choice.

Re:shocking

[bfields]

"I doubt they contribute to the kernel itself at all."

They do, see below--just not as much as some others.

$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
$ cd linux-2.6
$ git shortlog --author="@canonical.com" --author="@ubuntu.com"  --since="6 months ago"
Andy Whitcroft (12):
      checkpatch: make in_atomic ok in the core
      checkpatch: do not warn about -p0 patches when checking files
      checkpatch: correctly handle type spacing in the face of modifiers
      checkpatch: pointer type star may have modifiers following
      checkpatch: a modifier is not an identifier at the end of a type
      checkpatch: extend attribute testing to all modifiers
      checkpatch: add __ref as a sparse modifier
      checkpatch: version 0.28
      Input: synaptics - ensure we reset the device on resume
      suspend: switch the Asus Pundit P1-AH2 to old ACPI sleep ordering
      mmc: add MODALIAS linkage for MMC/SD devices
      acer-wmi: Cleanup the failure cleanup handling

Colin Watson (1):
      parisc: expose 32/64-bit capabilities in cpuinfo

Leann Ogasawara (1):
      x86: add Dell XPS710 reboot quirk

Luke Yelavich (1):
      ALSA: hda - add another MacBook Pro 3,1 SSID

Scott James Remnant (13):
      [SCSI] ch: Add scsi type modalias
      sbus: Auto-load openprom module when device opened.
      netfilter: auto-load ip6_queue module when socket opened
      netfilter: auto-load ip_queue module when socket opened
      [MTD] Auto-load mtdchar module when device opened.
      [MTD] Auto-load nftl module when device opened.
      V4L/DVB (10947): Auto-load videodev module when device opened.
      floppy: provide a PNP device table in the module.
      applicom: Auto-load applicom module when device opened.
      cyclades: Auto-load cyclades module when device opened.
      specialix: Auto-load specialix module when device opened.
      usb: Auto-load cdc_acm module when device opened.
      riscom8: Auto-load riscom8 module when device opened.

Re:Where is the missing 24.1%?

[slyn]

Individuals and anonymous contributors make up for the remaining 24% according to the youtube link posted in the first comment thread.