|
I found an interesting post on LWN.net that analyzed the Linux 2.6.2 source code to discover who contributed the most code and what company they work for. It struck me that the Linux development hierarchy is a lot like traditional software development.
The top 20 people contribute about 50% of the code. I think most large software projects are like that. The "code gods" pump out the core code while hundreds, sometimes thousands, of detail coders and testers work out the rest.
LWN.net took several approaches to looking at the contributors. A little over 48% of the code lines changed were contributed by 20 individuals.
| Developers with the most changed lines |
| Jeff Garzik |
20712 |
6.0% |
| Patrick McHardy |
15024 |
4.3% |
| Jiri Slaby |
13917 |
4.0% |
| Avi Kivity |
11726 |
3.4% |
| Andrew Victor |
9710 |
2.8% |
| Amit S. Kale |
9537 |
2.7% |
| Stephen Hemminger |
9120 |
2.6% |
| Geoff Levand |
8396 |
2.4% |
| Michael Chan |
8307 |
2.4% |
| Chris Zankel |
8099 |
2.3% |
| Mauro Carvalho Chehab |
7390 |
2.1% |
| Adrian Bunk |
6138 |
1.8% |
| Yoshinori Sato |
5232 |
1.5% |
| Al Viro |
4981 |
1.4% |
| Benjamin Herrenschmidt |
4588 |
1.3% |
| Thierry MERLE |
4549 |
1.3% |
| Dan Williams |
4516 |
1.3% |
| Jonathan Corbet |
3924 |
1.1% |
| Gerrit Renker |
3857 |
1.1% |
| Jiri Kosina |
3805 |
1.1% |
LWN.net next looked at who was paying these contributors. Meaning, the domain name of the company they worked for. It was not possible to get a domain name in all cases. But, here are the results from LWN.net.
| Top lines changed by employer |
| (Unknown) |
66154 |
19.0% |
| Red Hat |
44527 |
12.8% |
| (None) |
38099 |
11.0% |
| IBM |
25244 |
7.3% |
| Astaro |
15306 |
4.4% |
| Linux Foundation |
13638 |
3.9% |
| Qumranet |
12108 |
3.5% |
| Novell |
11930 |
3.4% |
| Intel |
11652 |
3.4% |
| SANPeople |
9888 |
2.8% |
| NetXen |
9607 |
2.8% |
| Sony |
8497 |
2.4% |
| Broadcom |
8349 |
2.4% |
| Tensilica |
8195 |
2.4% |
| Nokia |
5581 |
1.6% |
| MontaVista |
4394 |
1.3% |
| University of Aberdeen |
4324 |
1.2% |
| LWN.net |
3975 |
1.1% |
| Secretlab |
3370 |
1.0% |
| HP |
3211 |
0.9% |
While "unknown" and "none" accounted for 30% of the changes, the remaining 18 companies accounted for almost 60% of the code lines contributed. It is possible that some significant percentage of the "unknown" and "none" actually worked for some of these companies, but made their contributions from home.
Where is Google? Not surprisingly, Red Hat, IBM, and Novell were big contributors. But where is Google? They certainly use Linux and lots of Open Source software, but why don't they show up as even 1% contributors?
The Long Tail of software development - It would be interesting to see the distribution of contributors for the remaining 50% of the code. My guess is that there is a very long tail of small contributors. Again, not unlike lots of big traditional software development projects.
How many Open Source users actually make changes to the source code? I recently spoke at a Fortune 500 CIO conference. During my speech I did a real time poll of the audience of CIOs. The results confirmed my gut feel for how the market really works. Here are the questions and the results.
How many use Windows Server? 100%
How many use Linux? 45%
How many use both? 45%.
How many of you have made changes to the source code? 8%
Very few Open Source users ever touch the source code. So is it really about the source code?
A small number of companies contribute most of the code to Open Source development, so is it really about the community?
There are lots of free open source distributions of Linux, various databases, application servers, etc. Yet, Microsoft, Oracle, and BEA do pretty well in each market. Is it really about the price?
Everyone has an opinion, but I haven't seen any real survey data that covers these questions. Have any of you seen studies on this?
My real time survey of the CIO audience confirmed my belief that Open Source users are not zealots. They have pragmatic reasons for choosing Linux for some jobs and Windows for others. Understanding all those reasons will take more study. | 