Red Hat tops list of corporate Linux code contributors

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By Alex Handy

September 18, 2008 — When it comes to donating code to Linux, Red Hat is the company that contributes the most, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the USB and other subsystems in the Linux kernel.

Speaking at the Linux Plumbers Conference, he gave a keynote address that examined the contributions of those who've made Linux what it is today. All of these lists tracked contributions as patches, not initial donations to Linux.

The overall largest contributions to Linux code come from individuals who have no apparent affiliation with any company, as Kroah-Hartman surmised by looking at their e-mail addresses. Red Hat came in second overall, with 11,846 patches.

By comparison, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is the 79th most active contributor, with 100 patches. Kroah-Hartman said that such behavior on the part of Canonical will be detrimental to the company and the Ubuntu distribution over time.

“Then there are the distros that base themselves off of other distros, like Ubuntu and [Lance Davis'] CentOS. These distros have yet another layer between them and the original developers. Patches rarely, if ever, flow backwards into an upstream distro, and the developers are very unlikely to push their changes into the upstream packages as they don't feel the need or don't realize the issues involved as they rely on the upstream distro so tightly,” said Kroah-Hartman.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is another point where many large companies contribute to Linux. Software development tools company CodeSourcery leads the list of corporate contributors to the GCC.

CodeSourcery sells numerous derivatives of GCC, including G++, a bundled Eclipse and GCC suite for Linux and Windows. Red Hat, IBM, Novell, Google, Intel and AMD rounded out the GCC corporate contributors top ten list, in that order.

Elsewhere in Linux, Kroah-Hartman's calculations showed that IBM was the second-most prolific company in its contributions to Linux, with Novell, Intel, Oracle, the Linux Foundation and SGI rounding out the top ten list. The rest of the list was filled with individual contributors.

According to Kroah-Hartman, Red Hat led in contributions to X.Org and binary utilities code, while Linux manual pages came primarily from Google and the Linux Foundation.

Kroah-Hartman implored developers to put the Linux kernel first in their development priorities, to the point of advocating that they resign if their companies wouldn't meet their needs.

“What happens is if you are out here, working for a company that doesn't allow you to contribute upstream due to internal company issues, or just a lack of time allowed due to other things, that can be a problem for a developer who wants to contribute upstream but can't,” said Kroah-Hartman.

“The solution? Quit and go work for one of the companies that allow you to do this! … Right now, there is a very huge scarcity in developers who know how to do this kind of work. Lots and lots of companies are trying madly to train their internal engineers on how to work with the community, in this kind of very different development model. They are looking for and need people that already know how to do this kind of thing. So don't sell yourself short at all. Your skills are wanted and needed, so either tell your current employer that you need to have the time to do this kind of upstream work, or change to a company that knows this already."

Related Search Term(s): Linux, open source, Canonical, Red Hat

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