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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: ..."
At 18.2%, individuals are still the largest single group contributing to Linux. The next is RedHat at 12.3%.
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They seem to concentrate on the userland experience..
Not a bad idea.
The kernel is only a small part of a distribution. If Canonical is contributing nothing upstream to any of its packages, then that's unfortunate. Focusing on the kernel is silly.
Because the kernel works. It's the desktop that needs help.
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I hope this finally kills off the "GPL is bad for business" myth. Every one of those companies is paying for work on the kernel because it is good for their business. Red Hat, IBM, Novell, etc. aren't charities - they sponsor Linux development because it expands their markets and brings in profits.
There are a variety of kernel issues (think wireless drivers and other hardware support) that have a major impact on the userland experience. I'm not about to say where Canonical should invest their time -- there are more than enough issues to go around, and it isn't shameful for them to concentrate elsewhere as the GP implied -- but what happens with kernel development certainly impacts the Ubuntu userland.
I can't answer that question, but you know what other big linux using corporation is conspiciously absent from that list?
Google.
The point is that Linux would simply not exist except for the efforts of non-paid developers. The same cannot be said of Red Hat, IBM et al.
For the longest time, it seems like major business have collaborated in one of several ways:
But with Linux, it seems like a new model of collaboration for companies. It's mostly a meritocracy where a company's stature cannot get a bad or only-self-serving idea pushed into the end result. But because of that discipline, the final product is so compelling that companies want/need to participate anyway.
Am I right?
It pays for companies using Linux to contribute to the development. The long term savings of using Linux massively outweighs the small contribution of programming resources. And those contributing to development get to address the technical issues on top of their priority list. You can't get that kind of service out of Microsoft.
We're quickly approaching the time when an operating system is more like a utility than a product. A commodity delivery mechanism for business services. The potential for Linux, very quickly approaching realization, is that it can provide a unified stack from a mainframe down to embedded systems. That type of efficiency is very powerful economically. I'm sure MSFT can swim against that tide a long time but, eventually, efficiency will win.
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But since there methodology was garbage all that means is that someone using a Volkswagen email address wrote some code.
It says nothing about whether it was done as part of their employment with Volkswagen, or whether it was done out of business hours while hiding in their parent's basement.
Free software is about freedom, not about community busybodies telling companies how they should give back. If you're a company who can take free software, respect the licenses, and make a bajillion dollars off of it, then great! That's part of what freedom is about.
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This is a piss-poor way to determine corporate sponsorship, especially the first one. Because someone works on the kernel and uses his work email address, it does not follow that the employer sponsored his work.
If it wasn't work, I wouldn't pass that kind of thing through my work account. Could lead to all sorts of silly questions about whether you're using work time or work code (you're already using work resources...) for this, causing you more headaches as necessary.
Once you've established that it is for work it pretty much drops out of your commit stats whether you're full-time or the lone patch contributor. I short, I don't think your criticism is very valid.
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@ 22:30 in the video Greg speaks about who is funding the work, and @ 23:20 he says Canonical is 300 in funding/contributing to the kernel, then goes on to say Canonical does not give back to the community, i think he is right, other than free *ubuntu ISOs i dont i know of any source code anywhere that comes from them...
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Can you give me some info on "Independent Consultant"? .. they sound like a company I want to work for
Trust me, dude, you do NOT want to work for them. You have to work tons of unpaid hours, and they make you find your customers/clients, and they rarely pay you in a timely manner, and they make you do your own taxes. It's absolutely shocking, in my mind, that no one has reported them to the Better Business Bureau... I've thought about reporting them myself, but I left on decent terms, and don't want to burn any bridges.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
The Linux kernel ought to be done by now, and stable.
Drivers, file systems, and networks ought not to be in the kernel. That's a big part of the problem.
Real microkernels like QNX don't change much. USB and FireWire support were added without kernel mods, for example.
Yes, microkernels require extra copying. But copying is cheap on modern CPUs, as long as what's being copied was accessed recently and is in cache. Fear of copying cost dates from older CPU architectures, where instruction cycles mattered more than cache footprint.