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  • Some statistics on the Linux kernel

Hey everyone,

I was watching a cool talk by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a top contributor to the linux kernel. In his talk he displays some cool statistics on the contributions to Linux.

I guess these statistics show really well how people get paid to work on open source projects:

1- ???? 17%
2- Red Hat 11.9%
3- ???? 8.3%
4- IBM 7.8%
5- Novell 7.3%
6- Intel 4.4%
7- Consultants 2.1%
8- Oracle 1.9%
9- Linux Foundation 1.8%
10- SGI 1.8%

You may be wondering who are number 1 and 3.

Number 3 are unkown contributors, people we cannot trace back to a company. But number 1 are volunteers, people we know work for no one and are doing this on their free time.

Comments
It seems interesting to see that even though volunteers have the number 1 spot, over 80% of the contributions are made by paid professionals. The linux kernel project has over 5 000 000 (that's 5 millions) lines of codes.

It is nice to see that volunteers participate hard in such a project, yet a lot of people still get paid to work on it.

What do you think?
Well thanks for the interesting info. I am a "high level" (web) programmer, so I don't know much about the world of C and kernel development. But wow, 5 million lines of code... isn't that a lot? Maybe that is caused by all the hardware devices that need to be supported.
Indeed, over 40% of the code is for hardware drivers.
as long as drivers as compiled as modules and not staticly into the kernel, there is no difference between 5 million lines of code and 100 billion lines of code.
5 months later
There are three type of lies:
- Normal lies.
- White lies.
- Statistics.
Ain't I right?
(quoted from Mark Twain)
rahmu wroteHey everyone,

I was watching a cool talk by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a top contributor to the linux kernel. In his talk he displays some cool statistics on the contributions to Linux.

I guess these statistics show really well how people get paid to work on open source projects:

1- ???? 17%
2- Red Hat 11.9%
3- ???? 8.3%
4- IBM 7.8%
5- Novell 7.3%
6- Intel 4.4%
7- Consultants 2.1%
8- Oracle 1.9%
9- Linux Foundation 1.8%
10- SGI 1.8%

You may be wondering who are number 1 and 3.

Number 3 are unkown contributors, people we cannot trace back to a company. But number 1 are volunteers, people we know work for no one and are doing this on their free time.

Comments
It seems interesting to see that even though volunteers have the number 1 spot, over 80% of the contributions are made by paid professionals. The linux kernel project has over 5 000 000 (that's 5 millions) lines of codes.

It is nice to see that volunteers participate hard in such a project, yet a lot of people still get paid to work on it.

What do you think?
Who knows, open source projects might crash out Macintosh and Windows couple of years from now though.
Haha
They already are especially in the world of Mobile Os's with android, and the majority of servers run Linux AND..
The two most popular web browsers Chrome and Fire Fox are both open source.
Now the Linux OS's are becoming more and more user friendly and accessible to ordinary computer users not just "geeks". So its only a matter of time before a free alternative to Windows and OSX will win :)