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75% of Linux Code Now Written By Paid Developers
i_want_you_to_throw_ writes "During a presentation at Linux.conf.au 2010 in Wellington, LWN.net founder and kernel contributor Jonathan Corbet offered an analysis of the code contributed to the Linux kernel between December 24 2008 and January 10 2010. The Linux world makes much of its community roots, but when it comes to developing the kernel of the operating system, it's less a case of 'volunteers ahoy!' and more a case of 'where's my pay?'"
It's not clear from the article why anyone should perceive a contradiction between having high ideals and getting paid to do something you enjoy.
What's wrong with that?
Except you're not the first, because that question is mentioned at the end of the summary.
Linux just isn't ready for the desktop yet. It may be ready for the web servers that you nerds use to distribute your TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sights across the world wide web, but the average computer user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check their mail with, especially not when they already have a Windows machine that does its job perfectly well and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed nerds living in their mother's basement somewhere. The last thing I want is a level 5 dwarf (haha) providing me my OS.
How many paid kernel developers does microsoft have ? How many does Sun have ? I can't find any straight numbers on the web.
A thought strikes me, though. It seems unlikely to be more than a few dozen each, at most.
Lines of code written for money are evil and execute more slowly.
The Linux world makes much of its community roots, but when it comes to developing the kernel of the operating system, it's less a case of 'volunteers ahoy!' and more a case of 'where's my pay?'
Since when does community == volunteers?
That large, well funded corporations are now contributing members of the linux community is a Good Thing.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
I rely upon Linux for my business. If something isn't all it should be, or developments don't happen as fast as they could, I'm gratified to know that money is changing hands and somebody might get canned and replaced by another, better professional.
If Linux wants to sit at the adults' table -- and it clearly has the depth and breadth of functionality to do so -- then there needs to be the kind of professional accountability in its developers that only a paycheck can engender.
There seems to be some assumption that "community" means "unpaid". Not at all. The Free Software community includes a whole lot of people who get paid to use software to meet the needs of employers. If meeting those needs involves improving bits of Free Software, the employer benefits from having those contributions integrated into the product.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
How much does a line of code cost?
Cost-per-line is a patently bad way to compute the worth of code or value of a coder. Knowing what to code is more important then just writing the code. Features implemented or bugs fixed is probably a better measure.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Kinda defensive, aren't you? Who said anything was wrong with it?
The article itself basically presents the facts, but it does mention that it's interesting that a bunch of companies that otherwise compete with each other are in fact cooperating to develop Linux.
...it's less a case of 'volunteers ahoy!' and more a case of 'where's my pay?'"
I'd say its more a case of "I get paid to do this? who-hoo".
From most of the Linux advocates I hear commenting on slashdot, there AREN'T bugs or missing features in Linux. So why the developers? ;)
No, I'm serious. You'd think Windows couldn't stand on its own legs for two minutes before crashing due to the amount of bugs in the code, and you'd think Linux had no bugs whatsoever.
I like Linux and have no problem with devs getting paid to work on it. Sound slike a good idea to me; in fact, it sound slike how almost every single product in the world is made, pretty much. That has a user base over like 2. :)
So why isn't Google more involved in kernel development? I assume they use Linux extensively and hence make billions from using it. Do no evil, do no good?
As part of my job, I port Linux to our embedded boards and occasionally hack a driver or two.
However, in order not to scream out to our competitors "Hey! We're making a new product!", the small amounts of code I send pack at patches (it's a pain in are done so though a nondescript gmail account.
I suspect this practice is fairly widespread. Therefore, I'd say that 75% is an under-estimate.
Except of course, they aren't. They are being paid. Contrary to your post, Open Source Developers are being mainstreamed and getting paid to do it. You mistake "volunteer" for "open source". Volunteer developers are being marginalized, but Open Source Developers are gaining ground all the time.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Oh, man. To be a fly on the wall when Ballmer reads THIS little line...
"Within that field, Red Hat topped that chart with 12%, followed by Inte with 8%, IBM and Novell with 6% each, and Oracle 3%. Despite the clear commercial rivalry between those players, central kernel development worked well, Corbet noted."
And everyone thinks the Faraday Cage around his office was to keep his signals safe. The boys in Security know it is really to keep the chairs in his office...well, in his office.
Everyone agrees that there's nothing wrong with getting paid to develop the Linux code.
However, what I do fear is, what will happen after Linus? I fear that the reason there's no clash between the different goals is because the people who are leading do a proper job of choosing what gets into the code. Hopefully someone with a proven history will be the current maintainer but, if for any reason, the wrong person takes the lead, kernel development would take a serious blow. Sure you can say 'fork it' but the truth is that this would create a mess, even if development is reorganized.
It all boils down to the people who have the power, as anything else in the human world. Admitedly, given it's decentralized nature, Linux development is less at risk than propietary kernels of going in the wrong direction. But it could still happen.
"Remember, these people are getting paid for their labor, not paid a million times over, every time a copy of the code is distributed."
Now only if we could apply this concept to the music industry.
Which is why there are ready to play distributions such as ubuntu for the masses. I've installed countless ubuntu systems on people with little technical expertise that don't understand why they have 10 browser tool bars in their IE install and wonder why their computers run like shit. In every case I give them little information, and they are fine finding the "start" menu at the top of the screen and running a web broswer to waste hours on youtube, or finding a suitable mail client equivalent. At what point did they have to use the CLI and compile something by hand to get a working GUI? As far as I know, this was all built in ready to run.
You can. Go to your favorite bands next concert.
What percentage of these paid developers work for a company that derives its revenue primarily from software development?
How much does a line ... cost?
First one's free?
I disagree. Volunteer aren't being marginalized at all because most of the paid developers were at one point doing it for free. It's a sign Linux is maturing since now there are businesses willing to hire developers to add and maintain the features the care about.
Volunteers are still welcome but if they get well known for doing what they do then they are likely to get a job offer or two.
Why should someone feel guilty about being paid for their efforts? Business is a not a bad thing in itself, as people who work do need to be compensated, that is unless if they are independantly wealthy.
I have no issue whatsoever with a developer being compensated for their time, nor does it even raise an eyebrow for me.
I think the ethical standard here is that Linux is open source. That is open for peer review, open for other developers to work further on the ideas and ideals. Too often do people confuse this sort of "free" with the other sort: Mana from heaven.
Yes, you can download and install a linux copy for absolutely free, but thankfully, there is money to be made outside of just getting copies of bits and bytes to a PC. I do not think that there is anything wrong with that at all, and good on the highly intelligent and skilled developers of Linux saying "Where's my paycheck?"
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
So who decided that the Open Source movement was about *not* making money? I thought it was about enlightened self-interest. If we make the source of today's apps available to the coders of tomorrow, everyone wins. Up-and-comers get a chance to see real-world (and sometimes, cutting-edge) code - and the community (of software developers) gets new devs who show up already knowing some of the things *we* had to figure out the hard way.
The new guys get the benefit of our experience and in ten years, we get to hire better new guys.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
It is under the principle of better to pay a little bit more once, then paying over and over and over again and end up paying a whole lot more. Then there is also control, building of reputation and expertise. Not to mention to disruption of existing monopoly advantages.
When code competes rather than marketing, you get better code and better applications, when marketing competes you just get bigger lies and endless pay for the privilege beta testing.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Value for money, my friend. My Windows and my Linux machines have, lets be honest, a relatively similar number of problems. Windows suffers from the most outright bugs, but then Linux can still sometimes throw a hardware or compatibility wobbly, and sometimes does suffer the occasional deeper problem.
The difference is that one of them is distributed free over the internet, and the other cost me £150 and still delights in harassing how "genuine" I am every time I visit the developer's website.
You tend to be far more forgiving when something is both free (beer) and, feels like it belongs to you instead of some distant oligarchy.
Free as in price and use. Since there are many many businesses that benefit greatly from Linux why is it so surprising that such businesses would pay to develop it further?
If Linux wants to sit at the adults' table -- and it clearly has the depth and breadth of functionality to do so -- then there needs to be the kind of professional accountability in its developers that only a paycheck can engender.
Billions lost on failed UK IT projects by the 'adults' with developers receiving very fat paycheques shows it guarantees neither success of the project nor accountability within it.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
...
Do you have any idea at all what you are talking about?
Please compare a kernel from Dec 31st, 1999 to a kernel today. I think you'll find that there isn't much left from the 90s. Fragments here and there sure, but if Linux was anything at all like what it was around the year 2k, no one would use it on a production system now days.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So, exactly how much are you paying for the Linux you rely on for your business?
$699. I thought everyone paid this.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Sure, it's cool to be able to say that you're paid to work on the Linux kernel.
Certainly is. I'd decided at the age of 8yrs old the first company I was going to work for was Acorn. And it was. My friend loves Linux and so picks jobs where he gets to play with top end Linux clusters. Previously at CERN and now a top Swiss bank. For a real techie the work is more important than the size of the pay cheque.
But how many of that paid 75% would do it for free?
Depends what the code being contributed is. IBM is porting Linux to its high-end mainframes, but your average enthusiast doesn't have a $1M mainframe in his basement and so no incentive to write Linux drivers for one. I bet a large % of the paid developers are contributing code that is pretty useless to the home desktop user.
How many would have to do something else to put food on the table if there were not a corporation to pay them?
Those working on the kernel are a tiny fraction of OS developers. Around 99% of us do something else to put food on the table.
What I take away from this is the fact that the Linux "community" is dominated by corporations. In many cases (but not all), for-profit corporations, all trying to compete against several other for-profit corporations named Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, etc.
What I take away is that common sense is actually working. The Linux "massively scalable cloud community" and the Linux "big iron community" will be dominated by corporations. And maybe some of the contributions will trickle back and be useful to the rest of us. I can't see who is losing in that scenario.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
6/10. Moderately good troll, but don't try to be all things to all people.
You can make a good case pointing out that this has happened millions of times before, and you can make a good case that cell phones are making a laughingstock of OSS, but trying both makes you seem confusing.
If you want an AC's advice, focus on the cell phone angle. Keep saying that Android & OS X are based on FOSS but go beyond their base in ways that the open source community never could. Try to blur the line between hardware and software (Apple, Apple, Nexus One, Apple!) and say that because you can't have a computer without hardware, which is propietary, there is no such thing as a good open source computer.
And then blur it all into websites. Google is a company and a lot of FOSS people use Google, therefore they are hypocrites and can't handle living in the world they push on everyone else. Then focus back on cell phones. Go for the 'the average user doesn't care about FOSS' angle - they hate that - and demand a 100% free piece of hardware to run a 100% free OS. If you somehow get a bite by someone who interprets 'free' as 'unlocked' then talk about how they paid five times the price and switch your argument to support - again, cite Google as proprietary.
I hope to hear from you again! Good luck!
A performance is labor, as opposed to selling millions of copies of a recorded album.
Pretty sure you have your subjects mixed up. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" is an expression in physics.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
To what extent do contributing companies have the same motives as contributing individuals? To what extent do these, possibly disparate, motivations coincide with the needs of end users? I think this is the underlying question inherent in this article, but I don't really have any firm answers.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And if we wait another 100 years, then 100% of Linux code will be written by historians. That's the power of statistics.
What the hell are you talking about? Historians are people that study the past, not lived in the past.
Linux is a mature project, amounts of code written today have a minuscule impact on the overall project compared with amounts of code written in the late 90s.
Linux kernel 2.2.19 (2001): 1.8M SLOC
Linux kernel 2.6.32 (2009): 12.6M SLOC
Nothing to see here. Linux is as much a volunteer project as it has ever been.
So if something was started by volunteers, it'll always be a volunteer project even though those writing code are no longer volunteers? Or did you not RTFHeadline?
Sometimes slashdot really could use a "-1, Nonsense" moderation...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Linux is the adults table. The adults all sit at it. You've heard of Google, IBM, Sun, Oracle, Novell?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Free does not mean gratis in this context, as I am sure plenty of other people are going to point out. The Linux kernel is free in the sense that you may freely use, modify, or redistribute it, without worrying about patents or royalties, or EULAs or whatnot. Yes, I know some BSD license fans will probably point out that you are not free to redistribute it as if it were proprietary software, but the GPL is about protecting the other freedoms from that exact activity.
Palm trees and 8
The big advantage of commercial software is that the sales revenue allows you to pay people to write it. It should come as no surprise that people LIKE being paid for working. If developers are being paid, the money doesn't just magically appear. Somebody, somewhere is paying for it. Intel, Oracle, etc. get their revenue for selling other kinds of stuff to people, stuff that they paid somebody to make, write or whatever. The revenue can then be invested in other projects of which support for linux is merely one.
Another advantage is that if you pay people to do something, you can hold them accountable for their work and hence increase productivity.
In the end the fact remains: there's no such thing as a free lunch.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
I use linux professionally. So does most of the web. We're "forced" to GPL any improvements we have to make in the process of getting the job done. "Forced" is in quotes because fair is fair - so did everyone else including those bat**** crazy people following Linus and Sallman who wrote the seeds that grew into this and frankly I feel I'm getting more then I could ever give (at best correcting the occasional bug). GPL is there so it's clear to the managers that if you have a problem with that, feel free to pay quite handsomely. It's cheaper to improve linux (and/or the rest of GNU) then it is to not use it. Epic score - that was the whole point all along, right?
It's not clear from the article why anyone should perceive a contradiction between having high ideals and getting paid to do something you enjoy.
One day a situation will arise when you will be expected to do something you dont enjoy.
You will choose between love and money, you will begin to discover how much your high ideals are worth.
Far too few, but there is a maximum scrum in the Cathedral.
... combined, and it shows more and more. Google is now the paren to two new, special purpose Linux Distros, Android & Chrome, whic as they mature, will continue to backfeed the community.
The question goes to the Cathedral and the Bazaar dichotomy and the Brooks "Mythical Man Month" about OS 360, and how you count the dev team, kernel core or that and associated userland.
DEC: Tops 10 2 x lead + 6 mostly
AT&T Bell Labs: 3 x lead + 20
VAX-VMS: 1-2 lead + 40 (inc RSX-11 drivers)
WNT+: initially 1-4 lead + 20, clone VMS
Linux: initially 1 lead + 0, now 1 + 25 leads +4000
The 4000 number says it all. Rob Gingell, who used to run SUN's Solaris operation understood, and used to say, If we SUN make life difficult for our users, by most often making SUN specific firmware and foobared drivers, our customers will loose trust, write their own, in Universities and wealthy companies, and after a year all this work at high priced lockins will just hurt us.
He was right.
Linux has > 10 X the developers working on Windoze, Solaris, the RT-OS's
And yet, you outline a system that values of coder in a given area of expertise based on the number of lines of code produced.
LOC is never going to tell you the whole story, but in a system with some decent code review it will give you at least a pointer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's more about SAVING money. Linux is free, so they don't have to pay royalties. And in comparison to server OS costs to those companies listed, what's the relative value of programmer salaries?
I'm guessing not a whole lot...
Ah, those would be the bands which only visit our country once every five years?
Yes, I know I should be supporting local bands who nobody has ever heard of who play genres like 'mathgazer shoerock', but my hipster card got revoked.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Another big benefit is that you can pay people other than software developers to work on your project. For example, artists, designers, usability experts, technical writers, trainers/evangelism.
All attempts to get people to donate those skills to open source projects (except perhaps evangelism) have pretty much failed.
The problem with this story is while a lot of companies are working on Linux, none of them are focused on usability and none of them are focused on the desktop-- the thing Linux is worst at. Since all of these companies only use Linux on the server, they only pay for development efforts relevant to the server... which gives us the nice "Linux can run on a 1024-core computer, but it can't play a Flash movie without stuttering" problem. At this rate, it'll never improve.
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I've installed countless ubuntu systems on people with little technical expertise that don't understand why they have 10 browser tool bars in their IE install and wonder why their computers run like shit.
In that case, wouldn't the easier solution be to install firefox on windows?
Don't get me wrong - I like Ubuntu despite the problems I've been having with Linux in general (they really need to get ATI support working properly). I also love the free-software ideal. But, realistically, there's no performance difference between Ubuntu and Windows XP or windows 7. The only problems people have with MS operating systems is that they keep voluntarily installing all sorts of crapware which slows down their machines. If 90% of users switched over to Ubuntu, don't you think that sooner or later they'd start having the same problems?
"Linux can run on a 1024-core computer, but it can't play a Flash movie without stuttering" problem. At this rate, it'll never improve.
This have nothing to do with linux. If you have any complaint, post them to http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/contact.html . People are working on providing an alternative to the closed source adobe flash libraries, but i guess it is quite hard since they are closed source to begin with... and since i posted this, i can't even moderate you as troll or ignorant...
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
Only if what your doing is of little to no value. The Windows tax is trivial compared to what I use my Windows machines for. The genuine advantage thing used to bother me, but then I grew up and just realized that I got so much use out of the OS that the price wasn't really that bad. I'd spend more in 2 days getting drunk off my ass on the weekend when I lived in Orlando than the cost of Windows XP Pro, which I've used for everyday for the past 9 years, on most days for more than 8 hours a day.
The genuine advantage thing has only been a problem for me once, on a work PC, where the previous guy had used a stolen volume license ISO to make an image. The volume license was revoked, GA bitched about it, and I had to enter the key on the side of the machine and give MS a call. The only people this really bothers are pirates (which of course it doesn't bother much) and others who did something they shouldn't. Its really not that big of a deal and MS isn't the first to do it, its just a battle cry for those that don't have a real battle cry.
Free (as in no $$$) doesn't make me any less pissed off when it breaks. Being free doesn't do me any good when the time that it breaks is near a deadline that I'm struggling to meet in the first place, or when it breaks and I have to go to the data center with 3 hours of sleep after a long day. I am JUST as pissed off at the 'Free' software and OS as I am at the one I pay for.
You may not care, but my time is worth money and when you realize the cost of the Windows tax counts for a few hours of my time if I'm buying a new copy of Win7 ultimate, no upgrade ... well, I just have more important things to do than whine about the tax. Especially considering the lack of support (software/hardware) for the free software.
I still use the free software as my BSD web servers have uptimes going on 3 years now and I'd never get that out of Windows, but it has nothing to do with the cost of the software and everything to do with how much time I waste dealing with 'issues' with that platform.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Precisely. What this 75% represent is still voluntary contributions - its just voluntary contributions by businesses instead of individuals. It's actually a sign that the principles behind Linux are catching on; people who aren't coders are seeing the benefits of putting into the community, and are hiring people with the skills to do it on their behalf.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Sorry, in my experience, on the desktop, you're wrong. I'm typing this on an old P4 (with nVidia) 3GHz machine running Ubuntu. It's slow. This same machine used to have WinXP on it and it was fucking snappy.
I don't know when/what has gone wrong, but Linux on the desktop is slower than what it used to be.
I've also been using Linux since 0.9x. Linux on the desktop is buggy, slow and the UI has more problems than windows (eg, copy/paste/tabbing/default buttons/etc - ie, real basic shit). Blind fanb0ism doesn't change that.
Don't get me wrong, windows has it's problems, but for the typical end-user out there, windows is superior.
Billions lost on failed UK IT projects by the 'adults' with developers receiving very fat paycheques shows it guarantees neither success of the project nor accountability within it.
That, and if you look at Unix-like systems, you will see that all of them are dead or dying, except for those that are being carried by volunteers (BSD, GNU, Darwin (mostly BSD), and perhaps OpenSolaris). If "the kind of professional accountability in its developers that only a paycheck can engender" is what a software project needs to "sit at the adults' table", then maybe sitting at the adults' table is not what you really want for your project. After all, all those adults are now either dead or on life support.
To stay with the analogy, perhaps what a project needs to thrive is not to become an adult, but to stay a child.
And it makes sense, too: projects supported by the flow of money will wither when the money flow stops. This in addition to the argument that it always worth keeping in mind: profit-driven companies will do what maximizes profits, not necessarily what is best for the world. These two things often align, but not always and never completely.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Trouble is, while this isn't Linux's fault it is Linux's problem.
If basic software doesn't exist or work properly on Linux then people wont use it. If people don't use it then why is it in Adobe's or any else's interest to bother writing software that works for it?
What? And I thought it was to make money! You mean I've been wrong all this time?
Crapware people will TRY to target it. They won't succeed in sinking their hooks into the OS the way they can do on Windows. Any infestation will be easy to remove, and any deceptive apps very quickly exposed and blunted.
Windows malware is so successful because Windows is DESIGNED with DRM and concealment in mind to prevent you copying it to other computers, to prevent you duplicating the apps that you've bought. It makes it easy for malware herders to take control of the machines from their owners. Microsoft designed it that way.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Have you ever heard the phrase, "the buck stops here?" How about we stop passing the buck and get problems fixed? Note that in this case, "getting problems fixed" might actually involve leaving your basement and having to talk to actual human beings! Ick!
I frankly don't give a shit whose fault it is.
The sooner you figure that out, the sooner we might get a working Flash player.
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