Slashdot Mirror
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: ..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2SED6sewRw
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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
Should probably be a negative number of some magnitude. ...Last: SCO -31%
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
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.
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.
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