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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: ..."

13 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. You know what company is shamefully absent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yes, Canonical. It is nowhere to be seen in contributions to the linux kernel. Why won't the biggest name in desktop linux, which is funded by a millionaire, doesn't contribute to the linux kernel?

    1. Re:You know what company is shamefully absent? by dissy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I can't answer that question, but you know what other big linux using corporation is conspiciously absent from that list?

      Google.

      Serious question (I must not be awake enough yet to form a proper Google query)

      How much HAS Google actually contributed back to Linux?

      I mean I realize they USE Linux and all, but I haven't heard of any kernel updates/patches from them.

      Have they really contributed much back to the kernel? the distros? All that they make popular and well known are their apps, which is great and all, but an app is not a kernel.
      And even their apps seem to usually get late ports to Linux, just after the already late port to MacOS, which was embarrassingly late after the Windows versions.

      I don't mean this as knocking Google. They are awesome and I still heart them.

      And to cut off most of the replies I expect, contributing to OSS is not at all the same as contributing specifically to Linux. I know they do the former a lot. It's the latter I've never really heard of.

    2. Re:You know what company is shamefully absent? by Runaway1956 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Seems a lot of people don't know squat about Canonical. Some rich guy invested a good bit of his fortune into making Linux widely known and acceptable on the laptop. So far, he's done a pretty good job. If he contributes nothing else back into the upstream system, he attracts some pretty bright people to the Linux community - SOME of whom go on to contribute something. Reality check: Ubuntu does contribute, whether they actually work on the kernel or not.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    3. Re:You know what company is shamefully absent? by pthisis · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's not really "some senior people". Google's 0.9% of code contributed and 10.5% of patches signed off on exactly match the efforts of one employee, Andrew Morton. Aside from Andrew, they have a couple of other minor contributors but he is by far the most significant.

      --
      rage, rage against the dying of the light
  2. Re:shocking by PeterBrett · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, that was Canonical. Greg K-H publicly and controversially called them out about it at a kernel developer conference a while back, but I can't find a link right now.

    --
    Pirate Party UK
  3. Re:shocking by FudRucker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2SED6sewRw

    --
    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
  4. Re:Not quite a myth. by Blade · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Except if you group them as,

    People who do it for a company
    People who don't do it for a company

    Then your 18.2% are in the minority, which I think is the point here. The company folk might represent different companies, but they're still companies.

  5. Where is the missing 24.1%? by vtechpilot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you sum up the figures given in the article, it only accounts for 75.9% of the contributions. I am going to speculate that this missing quarter is contributed by many who contribute infrequently. IE, IT staff in companies that use Linux and find the occasional bug and submit a patch to correct it. If this speculation is correct, the largest group that contributes is 'Everyone Else'.

    --
    Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
  6. Re:the list Before a karma whore can... by millwall · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Should probably be a negative number of some magnitude. ...Last: SCO -31%

  7. Re:Myth definitely false! by mcgrew · · Score: 1, Interesting

    If there was a "-1, ruiuned a good joke" mod (instead of the comment "woosh") I'd surely be modded down for this, but I made a submission yesterday about a New Scientist article that debunks the "lonely nerd" myth. And here I thought that I was a slashdot anomaly, because sometimes women actually hit on me, even when I'm with my girlfriend.

    Unfortunately, sometimes even men hit on me, even when I'm with my girlfriend. But then again, it's been shown that Gay brains are structured like those of the opposite sex, so it shouldn't be surprising. If you're attractive to women, you're going to be attractive to gay men as well.

    Mods: this is either offtopic or interesting, take your pick.

    --
    Free Martian Whores!
  8. Re:the list Before a karma whore can... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone else notice that this list only adds up to ~50%? So what happened to the other 50? Is it spread out among other corps at 1%? When you add in the 7.6%(no affiliation given) and 18.2%(independent) you still only get ~75%. And considering Red hat only comes in at 12.3%, I would say that the largest contributors are those that aren't affiliated with a company at 18.2%.
    Seems like the headline and summary is a bit misleading.

  9. Re:the list Before a karma whore can... by Anarke_Incarnate · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Never let facts get in the way of their ramblings, especially Roy. He foams at the mouth but never actually got to the reason WHY any deal was developed. Novell tried to embrace interoperability and was told that they should join as the same deal was given to Red Hat, et al, and they thought "OK, sure, lets make this work and protect our customers."

    Novell contributes code to the same thing the boycottnovell mouth breathers use every day like KDE, Gnome, SAMBA and plenty of others, along with being part of the Open Invention Network using their patent portfolio as a shield. They are, at least for now, the good guys. The future may change. Also, while some may hate Mono, it opens the door to running .NET apps on Linux so its a win in a way.

  10. Re:the list Before a karma whore can... by bfields · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But since there methodology was garbage all that means is that someone using a Volkswagen email address wrote some code.

    I've been contacted personally by them to ask who my commits should be credited to. I'm not sure how many people they do that for--for people that have contributed just one or two patches, or have an obvious-looking address ("joe@bigcompany.com"), perhaps they just make the best guess they can.

    I'm not necessarily defending the process--I don't recall enough of the details about the methodology (I think they've written more elsewhere, but I can't find it right now)--but they are doing more than just scraping the git commits.