Greg Kroah-Hartman of SuSE Labs along with Jon Corbet of LWN.net and the Linux Foundation just published a very informative state of the union of the Linux Kernel development world.
The kernel is one of the largest collaborative software projects on the planet. According to this report, over 3700 individual developers from over 200 different companies have contributed to the kernel since 2005. That’s amazing!
I found a couple of very interesting facts in their report – the top 30 contributors and the top 30 organizations sponsoring kernel development.
The top 30 contributors include:
(Reference: Linux Kernel Development Report)
- Al Viro
- David S. Miller
- Adrian Bunk
- Ralf Baechle
- Andrew Morton
- Andi Kleen
- Takashi Iwai
- Tejun Heo
- Russell King
- Stephen Hemminger
- Thomas Gleixner
- Patrick McHardy
- Ingo Molnar
- Trond Myklebust
- Neil Brown
- Randy Dunlap
- Jean Delvare
- Jeff Garzik
- Christoph Hellwig
- David Brownell
- Paul Mundt
- Alan Cox
- Jeff Dike
- Herbert Xu
- David Woodhouse
- Greg Kroah-Hartman
- Linux Torvalds
- Dmitry Torokhov
- Alan Stern
- Ben Dooks
The top sponsors of Linux Kernel development are:
(Reference: Linux Kernel Development Report)
- None (developers who are doing work on their own)
- Unknown (anonymous contributors doing work on their own time)
- Red Hat
- Novell
- IBM
- Intel
- Linux Foundation
- Consultants
- SGI
- MIPS Technologies
- Oracle
- Monta Vista
- Linutronix
- HP
- NetApp
- SWsoft
- Renesas
- Freescale
- Astaro
- Academia (Universities)
- Cisco
- Simtec
- Linux Networx
- QLogic
- Fujitsu
- Broadcom
- Analog Devices
- Mandriva
- Mellanox
- Snapgear
And its pretty cool to learn from the report that 70% of all kernel developers are now getting paid to do what they enjoy the most!