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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: ..."
Captain Benjamin Willard was not a myth!
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
and i thought IBM and Red Hat just took the code and didn't give their changes back to everyone else
Linux isn't written by lonely nerds hiding out in their parents' basements
Of course! There's the lonely nerds hiding out in their parents' attics as well. More light, less ground water.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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?
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!
At least attempt to format the list, mate:
1. Red Hat: 12.3%
2. IBM: 7.6%
3. Novell: 7.6%
4. Intel: 5.3%
5. Independent consultant: 2.5%
6. Oracle: 2.4%
7. Linux Foundation: 1.6%
8. SGI 1.6%
9. Parallels 1.3%
10. Renesas Technology: 1.3%
11. Academia: 1.2%
12. Fujitsu: 1.1%
13. MontaVista: 1.1%
14. MIPS Technologies: 1.1%
15. Analog Devices: 1.0%
16. HP: 1.0%
0% SCO
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I hope this finally kills off the "GPL is bad for business" myth. Every one of those companies is paying for work on the kernel because it is good for their business. Red Hat, IBM, Novell, etc. aren't charities - they sponsor Linux development because it expands their markets and brings in profits.
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
Further down in the article they write about some code contributed by Volkswagen and some GPS-company.
In other words: RTFA
The point is that Linux would simply not exist except for the efforts of non-paid developers. The same cannot be said of Red Hat, IBM et al.
How are these companies "businesses that you probably don't associate with Linux?" I've heard of at least the top 8, and they are all pro-Linux companies as far as I know.
Can you give me some info on "Independent Consultant"? .. they sound like a company I want to work for
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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
Should probably be a negative number of some magnitude. ...Last: SCO -31%
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.
Free software is about freedom, not about community busybodies telling companies how they should give back. If you're a company who can take free software, respect the licenses, and make a bajillion dollars off of it, then great! That's part of what freedom is about.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
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.
This is a piss-poor way to determine corporate sponsorship, especially the first one. Because someone works on the kernel and uses his work email address, it does not follow that the employer sponsored his work.
If it wasn't work, I wouldn't pass that kind of thing through my work account. Could lead to all sorts of silly questions about whether you're using work time or work code (you're already using work resources...) for this, causing you more headaches as necessary.
Once you've established that it is for work it pretty much drops out of your commit stats whether you're full-time or the lone patch contributor. I short, I don't think your criticism is very valid.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's nonsense. Where's SCO on that list? We all know SCO wrote a big part of the Linux kernel.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Linux isn't written by lonely nerds hiding out in their parents' basements. It's written by people working for major companies...who just happen to also be nerds and like to be close to mom.
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 in the public domain. For any patch of sufficient size, the copyrights still remain with each individual developer(I'm ignoring derivative works, as that's beyond the scope of a slashdot comment).
So let's say IBM contributes a new driver. IBM keeps the copyright to the code, but gives license to use to all Linux users via the GPL. The key here is that because IBM still has that copyright, they are free to release that same driver as a closed source product as well, whereas Sun or Oracle couldn't take IBM's driver and sell a closed source version of it.
Microsoft has relased a few open source applications but I'm 99% sure they were PR stunts and they have zero interest in being active contributors to Linux success. I wouldn't expect to see Apple anywhere on the list either considering OSX is primarily BSD based.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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.
Actually, it's accurate, but your thinking appears to be a bit fuzzy. If you want to compare individual things, the largest single contributor is Red Hat at 12.3%. If you want to group things up, then yes, unaffiliated individuals constitute 18.2%, but corporate-affiliated individuals constitute 74.2%. What isn't a sensible comparison is grouping on one side but not the other. To say the largest contributor is unaffiliated individuals makes no more sense than saying the largest contributor is companies that contribute less than 1% (together they contribute about a quarter of the contributions, which is larger than 18.2%).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I'm a little surprised to see that Cannonical isn't on this list. Redhat, sure, but Cannonical has a huge marketshare.
Your surprise demonstrates the often pooh-poohed danger of confusing a kernel with an operating system. It shouldn't be surprising that Canonical's contributions to the Linux kernel are, like Volkswagen's, less than 1%. Both companies use the Linux kernel in their products, but one produces an OS, the other produces a car, neither have much business mucking around in Linux much. Their focus is elsewhere...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I don't care at all, since it's irrelevant.
But feel free to fixate on the details of the plucked out of the air company name.
It's obviously relevant.
CANBUS is short for Controller Area Network. It allows different automotive sensors to communicate with subsystem modules such as anti-lock braking, powertrain control modules, and engine control units. This is a good case for where a company that uses Linux, but whose product is NOT information technology specific might want to be involved in the development of Linux.
Real-time linux has had a big push from integrated systems development, where it's either "on-time" or it fails. Automotive is just another sector that can benefit from this. Any company that wants the most out of Linux is well served by having one or two full time developers whose sole purpose is to contribute to Linux and other open-source projects they rely on to be sure they continue to meet their requirements.
Already, too many companies use Linux for the core products of their business but contribute nothing back and will constantly be chasing their tail to keep their own modifications synchronized with new kernel releases. VW did the right thing and all you can think of to do is troll.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.