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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: ..."

4 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Re:shocking by FudRucker · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

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    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
  2. 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'.

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    Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
  3. 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.

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    "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
  4. 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.

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