Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Who writes the Linux kernel?

February 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Who writes the Linux kernel?

TAGS: Linux

LWN.net has an interesting article [Sub req'd] detailing the contributors to the Linux 2.6.20 kernel. The author attempts to determine just who (as in individuals) and who (as in their employers) writes the Linux kernel. It's not an easy task.

It is not uncommon to see Linux referred to as a volunteer-created system, as opposed to the corporate-sponsored, proprietary alternatives. There has been little research, however, into how much work on Linux is truly "volunteer" - done on a hacker's spare, unpaid time. In general, the assumption that Linux is created by volunteers is simply accepted.

Determining the real provenance of free software can be a daunting task. There is a wealth of information available for those who look, however. In an attempt to shine some light in this area, your editor hacked up some scripts to do a lot of digging around in the kernel git repository. The idea was that, by looking at who is putting changes into the kernel, we can get a sense for where our source is coming from.

LWN goes at it in a few different ways (measuring patches, lines changed, lines removed, etc.), one of which is to measure those developers that change the most lines of code.

Perhaps most interesting for readers of this blog, however, is who employs these developers. Keep in mind that some people don't use their corporate email address when working on the kernel, so LWN filled in this information when they knew it, and reached out to developers when they didn't. So, this list is imperfect, but probably as good as anything else one could put together.

The list gives Red Hat a lot of support in its claims to be innovating in the kernel space. With nearly 15% of the heavy lifting being done by its developers (nearly double that of any other company, and triple its nearest competitor), it also means that Red Hat (as well as Novell, which does a fair amount of kernel work, too) can legitimately offer superior support on Linux. Support that Oracle's PR fluff just can't match. (Oracle contributed less than 1% of the kernel work.)

But this isn't really about any one particular company. It's about how you do business in open source. To be credible in open source, you must write code. Great code. And lots of it. Marketing only takes you so far in the open source world. At some point, you must show substance.

That substance, unfortunately, doesn't automatically translate into sales. For that, a compelling business model is required. You know that I'm a fan of Red Hat's model. (So much so that Alfresco just adopted the same 100% GPL model.) But there are others. The key point is that you must have substance both in code development and in business development.

Not easy, but definitely worth it.

Posted by Matt Asay on February 23, 2007 09:56 AM

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