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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%.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Yes, once Linux was established as a viable OS, companies jumped on the bandwagon.
The real business issue about GPL'd code isn't whether established companies will support it once it is successful, but whether you can start your own for-profit software business if you license your software under the GPL.
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
@ 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...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.