Torvalds: "People Who Start Writing Kernel Code Get Hired Really Quickly"

alphadogg writes Now more than ever, the development of the Linux kernel is a matter for the professionals, as unpaid volunteer contributions to the project reached their lowest recorded levels in the latest "Who Writes Linux" report, which was released today. According to the report, which is compiled by the Linux Foundation, just 11.8% of kernel development last year was done by unpaid volunteers – a 19% downturn from the 2012 figure of 14.6%. The foundation says that the downward trend in volunteer contributions has been present for years. According to Linus Torvalds, the shift towards paid developers hasn’t changed much about kernel development on its own. “I think one reason it hasn't changed things all that much is that it's not so much unpaid volunteers are going away as people who start writing kernel code get hired really quickly,” he said.

Comments

Re:Upper management be like

[Austerity Empowers]

Or, people who understand how to write good software and understand actual hardware designs & issues are very valuable. And yeah, if you can tolerate difficult personalities, that's always needed...

May also show wider adoption...

[Art Challenor]

Despite 2015 not being the year of Linux on the Desktop, it IS the year of Linux in just about every embedded device, board and SOC on the market. This means that there are more developers being paid to work on Linux, presumably including the Linux kernel.

The summary is full of percentages. 11.8% seems to be about 19% less than 14.6% but that just serves to obfuscate. I'm not willing to dig into the "fill-in-the-form-to-read" article, but would assume that the total number of paid developers has increased accounting for the change in percentages.

Re:May also show wider adoption...

[Dutch Gun]

Yep, that wasn't too long ago. Ballmer was, of course, actually talking more about the GPL license and it's "viral" nature, as they viewed it. Microsoft has previously been forced to release source code when GPU code was found in one of it's products.

Interestingly, it's a very different Microsoft today, having realized that iOS and Android have destroyed them in the mobile space, and with Linux as a very strong competitor in the server market. You see them now even porting some of their most important properties (Office, Outlook, .NET, etc) to competing platforms, which would have seemed unbelievable just six or seven years ago. Competition is a good thing.

Re:And so Linux has become a boring mess...

[halivar]

Well, I guess that opens a philosophical discussion of whether writing device drivers counts as "kernel coding" at all.

Re:And so Linux has become a boring mess...

[DarkOx]

So what if it gets pulled into the kernel, than its kernel coding; at least in Linux land because driver code can touch memory belonging to other parts of the the kernel. If we are talking about Minix or something it might not be.

And So what if he did it to pad his resume. Drivers are useful to anyone who has the kit they are written for. Even if he abandons it quickly a working or mostly working driver is still useful because someone else can maintain it. Its way easier for me take your driver for 3.0.19 and tweak it build on 3.0.22 or whatever than it is to work out the hardware details.

He wins and the community wins.