

Who wrote Linux Kernel 2.6.20? - vinutheraj
http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/

======
old-gregg
I've always been curious who are these people who commit so much personal time
on open source projects (instead of doing rounded corners kind of web 2.0
work) and I googled Jeff Garzik, seemingly the most productive developer
during this release:

<http://linux.yyz.us>

Notice that even his home page is all about his projects as opposed to self-
promotion.

Compare that to the douchebag Seth Sternberg (<http://bit.ly/1m9PTZ>), who
built a company on top of libpurple's team open sourced work, bragged about
building "from nothing to something" and _didn't even mention them_ in TC
article, preferring to speak about his "desire to build the next great thing"
buillshit instead.

~~~
there
i'm sure many startups rely on open-source projects that they don't bother
mentioning. while i wouldn't call it nothing, libpurple is just a c library
for abstracting IM protocols. there's still a lot of other work to be done to
turn that into a fully scaled web service.

~~~
ciupicri
A lot of work was invested in libpurple too in order to implement (reliably)
all the protocols.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Not to mention the fact that many of those protocols had to be reverse
engineered.

------
mwcremer
From 2007. Try this:

<http://lwn.net/Articles/348445/>

~~~
grogers
Interesting that the statistics haven't changed a whole lot over the course of
2 years - except that the unknown category is way smaller.

------
corbet
2.6.20 is relatively old, of course; I've done this research for every
subsequent kernel as well. If you go to the LWN kernel index
(<http://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/>) and look under "releases", you'll find the
stats for each kernel release.

There's a longer-term version of this research available from the front page
of the Linux Foundation's site as well.

------
robk
It's disappointing that Google isn't more prominent on that list given their
dependence on open source in so many places and having acquired such deep
talent over the years.

~~~
mbrubeck
What? Only five businesses ranked higher than Google in number of changesets,
and all of them are companies that (unlike Google) distribute their own
versions of Linux to customers.

Fourteen businesses rank higher than Google in the most recent (2.6.31)
report; most or all of them are Linux distributors or hardware vendors. (Note:
I'm not counting _none_ , _unknown_ , _academia_ , _consultant_ , or the Linux
Foundation as businesses.)

Compare this to other web companies like Amazon, Yahoo, and Facebook. They use
Linux just the same way Google does, but they sponsored _zero_ lines of code
identified in this report. [Greg K-H gently chastised Amazon about this when
he did a tech-talk there on Linux development.]

~~~
scythe
For the record, Google _also_ distributes its own version of Linux to
customers, whereas Amazon and Facebook do not. It'd still be nice to see them
contribute, of course.

As for Yahoo, it runs on FreeBSD, actually. They provide hosting to the
FreeBSD project, though I don't know if they write any code.

~~~
mbrubeck
That's true, I forgot about Android. Are there any other Google Linux
distributions that I missed?

Note that Amazon also distributes a custom embedded Linux system on the
Kindle.

Replace Yahoo (oops!) with some other web site operator. It doesn't matter
which, since not one of them contributes as much as Google. :)

~~~
hboon
Google Search Appliance.

------
rams
Related, "Linux Kernel Development Stats from Greg Kroah Hartman":
<http://bit.ly/1rutJD>

