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: ..."
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'!"
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!
They seem to concentrate on the userland experience..
Not a bad idea.
The kernel is only a small part of a distribution. If Canonical is contributing nothing upstream to any of its packages, then that's unfortunate. Focusing on the kernel is silly.
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%
Because the kernel works. It's the desktop that needs help.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
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.
There are a variety of kernel issues (think wireless drivers and other hardware support) that have a major impact on the userland experience. I'm not about to say where Canonical should invest their time -- there are more than enough issues to go around, and it isn't shameful for them to concentrate elsewhere as the GP implied -- but what happens with kernel development certainly impacts the Ubuntu userland.
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
I can't answer that question, but you know what other big linux using corporation is conspiciously absent from that list?
Google.
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.
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
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.
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
They're a little bit further down.
The next two rows on the list in TFA are as follows:
17: Freescale 1,375 0.9%
18: Google 1,261 0.9%
I'm not sure why the parent decided to stop where they did.
These rankings are based on number of kernel changes submitted broken down by employer.
However it seems that Google employees are making a significant contribution to Linux project management and quality processes though: Red Hat employees sign off on over 36.4% of changes, which is the highest proportion of sign-offs in the hands of a single company, but Google has second place in that table with 10.5% of all sign-offs. It looks like several Google employees are filling the roles of subsystem maintainers - they may not write as much code as some other companies but they are still contributing some senior people.
Interesting stuff!
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
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.