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The Myth of the Isolated Kernel Hacker

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the get-outta-yer-mom's-basement dept.

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: ..."

2 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Re:the list Before a karma whore can... by millwall · · Score: 5, Informative

    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%

  2. Re:You know what company is shamefully absent? by sapphire+wyvern · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!