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:You know what company is shamefully absent?

[Anonymous Coward]

They seem to concentrate on the userland experience..

Not a bad idea.

Re:Not quite a myth.

[nvivo]

At 18.2%, individuals are still the largest single group contributing to Linux. The next is RedHat at 12.3%.

By your analysis, the largest single group contributing to Linux is actually the "people working for a company" group, with 81.8%.

It makes sense

[HangingChad]

...everything else is written by someone who's getting paid to create Linux.

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.

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

[Arthur Grumbine]

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.