Red Hat vs. SUSE vs. Canonical Contributions To The Mainline Linux Kernel Over The 2010s

[starshipeleven]

RedHat (IBM) owning Linux is a bad thing....

Go troll somewhere else

[Mez']

For this article, we are only concerned with functionally relevant employees (i.e. Linux kernel contributors), correct? We aren't concerned with other functions like custodial services, security, office support staff, marketing, programmer contributions to projects other than the Linux kernel, etc. or the degree to which each individual company has these non-kernel-related functions fulfilled in-house (i.e. included in employee head count) or contracted out (and thus not included in employee head count).

It's usually a solid assumption to say it is quite proportional to the total. You make the different departments grow according to the overall size. Each company does this its own way but you don't limit yourself to 2 in HR and 2 in Finance when you grow above a certain size...
So, it seems relevant.

[starshipeleven]

Xgl - Killed by RedHat (AIGLX literally does the same thing and was total NIH)
Upstart - Killed by RedHat
Unity - Killed by RedHat
MIR - Killed by Redhat
AppArmor - ...
snap - ...

my cat -Killed by RedHat

just look at chrome (opensource) flexing over the internet now that they have 90% market share.

Lol wtf you mean with "opensource" here. It's a code drop fueled by one of the biggest IT corporations of the fucking planet.

It's better than IE and for a long while it was better than Firefox, plus they adopted aggressive bundling so anything you installed would bundle Chrome.

All I'm saying here is RedHat (IBM) is far too powerful for a healthy Linux ecosystem.

We are still far from a monopoly in anything, even fucking init systems.

[starshipeleven]

You forgot Bazaar, Xsplash, Usplash, Launchpad, Ubuntu Software Center, Ubuntu One and the best for last, Ubuntu Edge.

*squiggly excited noises*

[eidolon]

It's usually a solid assumption to say it is quite proportional to the total. You make the different departments grow according to the overall size. Each company does this its own way but you don't limit yourself to 2 in HR and 2 in Finance when you grow above a certain size...
So, it seems relevant.

Some companies are much leaner than other near peers, but okay.

[Charlie68]

They are simple statistics, I do not see what the problem is ... that Canonical has never made great community contributions is known and when he does, he shouts so loudly, that they can almost make themselves "hated" by others, who silently have hard worked, this is also true.

[geearf]

I was really surprised at Suse numbers, I thought they'd be somewhat similar to Red Hat's.

Red Hat employees: 13,400 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat)
Suse employees: 1750 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE)
Canonical employees: ~650 (I work here, but Wikipedia says 443).

Obviously, I'm biased but might be nice to do some of these numbers per employee as well.

But after reading this, it makes sense, so thank you!

[elatllat]

I found these statistics totally expected... again with the colours that could have been matched lol.

[pal666]

Obviously, I'm biased but might be nice to do some of these numbers per employee as well.

any one-man company will win. what good such metric makes?

[pal666]

What would be the most interesting is to compare these relatively to Turnover/Sales revenues. Ultimately, that would indicate how much each company dedicates of their forces to contribute.

i'm afraid that by removing (useless)apparmor commits we will get canonical much closer to zero. i don't see how revenues relate to subj. redhat makes revenue from support, so most of its personnel has to do support. i am interested in what i get from redhat. redhat makes zero revenue from me and canonical makes zero revenue from me. so from my revenue standpoint they are equal and i like one which contributes more. and btw there are other projects besides kernel, for example i'm interested in gcc.