Who Wrote, and Paid For, 2.6.20 238
Corbet writes "LWN.net did some data mining through the kernel source repository and put together an analysis of where the patches came from. It turns out that most kernel code is contributed by people paid to do the work — but the list of companies sponsoring kernel development has a surprise or two." The article's conclusion: "The end result of all this is that a number of the widely-expressed opinions about kernel development turn out to be true. There really are thousands of developers — at least, almost 2,000 who put in at least one patch over the course of the last year. Linus Torvalds is directly responsible for a very small portion of the code which makes it into the kernel. Contemporary kernel development is spread out among a broad group of people, most of whom are paid for the work they do. Overall, the picture is of a broad-based and well-supported development community."
Define "volunteer." (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is, even though some of those changes were done by programmers in the course of their paid jobs, isn't the work still being "volunteered," albeit by the company rather than an individual? As companies, Red Hat, IBM, Novell, or Big Roy's Heating and Plumbing don't need to help improve the kernel, nor are they directly paid for their work on it. They simply do so because a better Linux kernel does benefit them directly or indirectly, as do many individual volunteers.
Funding... (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite a paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
So... the surprise is that there is no surprise?
GPL vs. BSD (Score:5, Insightful)
It is just confirmation of old statement that GPL(v2) provides better (at moment best) ground for cooperation between vendors.
Many companies are willing to control what OS does with their software and hardware - and Linux gives them that chance on cheap. But even more so, GPL allows Linux to "merge" back possible code base "forks". That's next to impossible with BSD licensed code most tend to keep closed.
Let's just hope Linux would be able to go on surviving the "snowball" effect of the merges.
Re:Interesting how much was conributed by paid dev (Score:3, Insightful)
Tom
No Real Surprises (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fairly Interesting Overview (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you have the expensive systems that use Linux
Intel and HP are still hopping that the Itantium will work out in the end and frankly Linux is the big OS for the Itantium. Not to many hobbiest have an Itantium sitting around so Intel and HP probably contribute a lot of code for the Itantium port.
IBM sells a lot of Power systems that run Linux so they probably contributed a lot of code to support the new Power6. Not to mention the the 360/370/Zmachine port.
Then you have Mips contributing for the embedded market.
Linux is now big business.
Re:GPL vs. BSD (Score:3, Insightful)
If someone's been taking BSD-licensed code and changing the license to GPL when it goes into the kernel tree, that's kinda lousy, in my opinion.
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:3, Insightful)
If my large copy jobs are routinely late and I call Officemax and tell them they need to get their heads out of their asses, fire the guy responsible, and get me my stuff on time; am I volunteering my free consulting services to Officemax? It is all a matter of perspective. The term "volunteer" in our culture generally carries implications of altruism rather than self interest. The important point to take away from this is that despite the common perception otherwise, most Linux development is done for profit, even if that profit is not accumulated in so direct a manner as selling the OS.
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:4, Insightful)
So the work is not volunteered, it is a component of an agenda.
Doesn't the same argument apply to non-monetarily-compensated "volunteers"? Don't they have an agenda as well?
What's wrong with 'I'? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GPL vs. BSD (Score:5, Insightful)
Because when Microsoft makes ftp.exe using BSD-licensed code, all they have to do is tell people that it had BSD-licensed code, not give them the code nor the changes they made. Or, take a look at the various commercial forks of postgres that add replication, live backups, or whatever. Sure, it'd be nice if they gave these features back to the postgresql database server, but the developers chose the BSD license knowing that the people who do stuff with the code don't have to give back.
This is why the GPL makes code Free, while the BSD license makes programmers Free.
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people donate, volenteer for something because they know it will benifit them in the end(how many people at Harvard who have volenteering on their application to the school volenteered because it was something they wanted to do, I would guess half does that make their time in a soup kitchen less valuable or appreciated?). This doesn't mean that its any less noble in the end.
Re:BDFL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:5, Insightful)
Most everyone working on the kernel has an agenda and that's okay -- open source isn't about communism or pure philanthropy, it's more of a libertarian or anarchocapitalist philosophy.
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting idea, but hardly accurate (Score:3, Insightful)
Finding an answer to that question is somewhat trickier than looking at who wrote the patches, mostly because very few developers say "I wrote this on behalf of my employer." The approach taken by your editor was relatively simplistic, but, perhaps, the best that is practical. Any patch whose author's given email address indicates a corporate affiliation is assumed to have been developed by an employee of that corporation. So any patch posted by somebody with an ibm.com email address is accounted as having been done by an IBM employee.
While I still find the result interesting, and while I also would like to know which organizations contribute the most to the kernel, I don't know that this method is really a good way to reflect whether the work was done in a "sponsored" fashion.
That is, just because someone's email address shows that they're from IBM, doesn't necessarily mean that they were being paid by IBM to explicitly work on the kernel. For all we know, they might have "15 minutes of real, actual work" like this guy [wikipedia.org] and are just hacking away in their cube because they're bored. Maybe not, but still, for he purpose of determining which companies contribute most (or the individuals motivations to contribute), that seems like a shaky method of proving or disproving things.
Considering that webhosts are still on 2.4..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:4, Insightful)
If you put it that way, no one is a "volunteer developer" for linux. They write / change code for their own benefit (to add features, improve functionality). Once they've finished, they usually give their code to "the linux community", but the reason they do the work in the first place is because they want to fix / improve the way their system runs.
Re:I find it intriguing ... (Score:2, Insightful)
The same could be said of government. Very few people would argue for entirely abolishing either government or corporations. Many people would argue for placing limits on the power of governments and corporations (checks and balances).
Most people are extremely dependent on the government (roads, military, courts, etc.). Does that mean that they are "biting the hand that feeds them" when they argue for limited government?
Nice Study, Twisted Conclusions. (Score:2, Insightful)
The surprise is how twisted this study is. The author ignored the opinion of authors to concentrate on email addresses and the main conclusion is that 65% of kernel developers have a job. That people able to contribute to the Linux kernel would have a job is not much of a surprise. Ignoring the opinion of those you are trying to study is.
So, let me quote all the relevent sections to back up what I have said.
The statistics are all very nice, but the conclusion is forced. I'd go with the opinion of the authors themselves, code is still not being written on behalf of companies.
That's an unfortunate conclusion and things are changing. When free software takes the place of non free, the entire mechanism now "supporting" M$ and others will switch to free software authorship. When that happens hardware makers will step up to the plate with free drivers and contribute significant code. Many already do this. User feedback will still be important and of high quality, so the actual distribution of "this code paid for by Broadcom" vrs, "this code from Broadcom fixed by 101 happy users" is still hard for someone like me to predict.
Re:Interesting how much was conributed by paid dev (Score:2, Insightful)
Snags could include things like "driver not working" to "driver not present/existing", etc. Snag doesn't mean "Linus is a shit head, fucked up the kernel and now I gotsta fix it." Snag just means something that isn't working yet.
If you look at a lot of non-distro patches, they're from people who ran into some problem or another.
Tom
Re:oh noes.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the DARKEST secret!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Companies are shelling out billions of dollars each year just to run some software that needs to be renewed, updated and purchased again and again and again.
Some companies are investing their workers or their donations into the community software projects because in some way, it will truly benefit them in a way that will not expire the way proprietary software does. So when people start noticing that businesses do more than just "use" F/OSS, but they contribute to it in a way that makes it more usable for themselves. And depending on the way they contribute, they can also write off some on their taxes as part of a tax strategy.
So companies can spend their software budget in a way the keeps them locked in and paying ridiculous annual fees and subscriptions, or they can actually pay to get the software they actually want in the way they want it, benefit themselves, benefit the public and even build a lot of good will in various communities.
I am hopeful to see the rest of the F/OSS revolution in my life time...
The analysis is broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Many patches are fed in through email lists etc where the maintainer (more likely to be a "named person") picks it up and pushes it upstream. I expect many volunteers will be in that group.
Re:I find it intriguing ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:1, Insightful)
At least free software people admit open source people exist and that there are many reasons why people contribute. You, like ESR and his editing of the "hacker" entry in the jargon file, are not a hacker but a hack - pushing the open source agenda every chance you get and editing the definition to try and erase your opponents. Ironically Stalinistic, considering he's the favourite strawman of anarchocapitalists and libertarians.
Re:GPL vs. BSD (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing. But if I merge changes into a piece of BSD-licensed code, there's nothing to stop my competitor 20 miles down the road downloading this piece of code complete with my changes, making a few minor tweaks to it, keeping those tweaks private and selling it - even though I provided a lot of the code which his product is based on.
With the GPL, he can still make tweaks to it but he's got to make those tweaks freely available to anyone he distributes code to. Many choose to simply submit these tweaks as patches upstream rather than maintain their own fork of the software - not really a lot of point in being that anal when the license explicity allows your customer to do that anyway.
What we're seeing happening now - particularly in the embedded space - is that manufacturers are taking the free stuff in Linux, tweaking the kernel and submitting changes where necessary but keeping the majority of their proprietary code logically separate in userland so they don't have to GPL it. Hence why you can have a router based on Linux which is technically open source, but the clever stuff (eg. removing the complication from configuring iptables with a web app, a means of holding firewall rules and some glue to turn these into iptables commands) remains private.
Re:BDFL (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you figure exactly? It looks to me like a number of companies find it to be a profitable endeavor to pay their developers to work on a free and open project. The benefits to, say, IBM, are an increasingly stable server platform they can sell on their hardware. RedHat, for example, runs their business off of supporting Linux - and as a result also has a vested interest in its development.
Honestly, I don't know how you came to the conclusion that 'opensores does just not work' (great English, by the by). I'd say that it's evidence that Open Source not only works, but if your project is useful to a company, they may just hire you to develop it for them.
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:4, Insightful)
Lots of geeks are anarchocapitalists, so it makes sense that they'd want to claim the successful and popular open source movement as their own, but I don't think they're as similar as you assert.
Anarcho-capitalism is about profit and individual property as the central pillars of society. Open source is not about profit, and it's definitely not about private property.
Open source is a tradition that was established to fight back against those who sought to profit from proprietary computer code. It was introduced as a way to foster cooperation and support between those programmers who didn't seek to profit from their code, but did want to share it with other like-minded people. Open source has become so successful that entire profit-making industries have come to depend on it, but at its core Open Source is designed as a sort of "non-profit cooperative" for people who code for free. Open source is a gift economy - sure everyone gives gifts for different reasons, but they're still gifts.
The open source philosophy is also clearly against private property. Of course, the only form of property that open source involves is intellectual property, which many anarcho-capitalists claim is a special case, but I think the point should still be made that nobody owns open source code, and nobody can own it. Since private ownership of everything is a central tenet of anarcho-capitalism I can't see where the similarity is.
I know socialism is a bad word on Slashdot, because it means red commie soviets who are going to take away all our civil rights and make us live like in 1984, but personally, I see the open source movement as an example of voluntary socialism, or anarcho-socialism - programmers have decided that the existing market forces are abusing their property rights to producing crap software for ridiculous prices. So, they have voluntarily formed a network which allows them to share their resources in a non-market environment.
The reason open source software is so good is precisely because it's not driven by profit-oriented market forces, but by the diverse motivations and interests of many people and organizations. Obviously they're not doing it out of pure generosity, but in general when people develop open source code they're considering how to make good code primarily, not how to make lots of profit primarily.
Re:uni (Score:1, Insightful)
Some university courses actually require their students to submit code to a development project like Linux.
If you really thought this was embarassing, modding down the facts isn't going to change it.
Re:Define "volunteer." (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure open source was introduced for many different reasons, sometimes even conflicting reasons, but for me open source means that I can profit from my labor, my reputation, my tacit understanding of the code, etc. That is what I get when I invest my time and my money into open source.
And to me at least, the actual code is only an artifact, it may be valuable, but it is not the only valuable part of my work, nor is it necessarily the *most* valuable part of my work. So open source (for me) is/was a pricing decision -- it is/was a pricing decision that holds/held the most promise in terms of profit (considering my situation and the type of market I was in at the time). Also, open source was the easiest way for me to profit from my work since I didn't have the resources, nor the knowledge, to seriously productize my code any other way.
Just thought I'd add my 0.2
Re:Is Linux a male only domain? (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux is what you make of it. If you want a "less geeky" distribution, however you define that, either contribute to a distribution or start your own.
I would think contributions would be evaluated on their own merit, regardless of the contributor's gender. Besides, when all you know about the other person is their name and email address, you can never be completely sure about their gender, either.