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

[Mez']

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.

This is not a bias. You can make some people believe anything you want out of gross statistics (even that Romelu Lukaku is a good football player). They don't mean much.

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.

[Britoid]

Why GNOME ? (and not KDE)
GNOME is not at all a fundamental part of a GNU/Linux system. AFAIK, GNOME is used by a minority of desktop systems, and not at all by server systems.

Can do KDE too! Was just using it as an example.

I know GNOME has people from multiple companies working on it.

[birdie]

Michael, these comparisons are not only worthless, but they are also simply bad because people will take them at face value without thinking twice.

These companies are related to Open Source quite differently which means they will have quite different amounts of contributions. For instance, RedHat employs core GTK/Gnome/kernel/SeLinux/SystemD/PulseAudio/etc. developers, so it becomes immediately obvious Suse and Canonical will trail RH by a large amount.

We've already seen how much people hate NVIDIA and in your previous piece where you compared NVIDIA's contributions to the kernel vs Intel's and AMD's which proves that even further despite the fact that the latter two companies produce a whole lot more hardware that needs support from the kernel.

Please stop. Maybe it's a slow news day but we'd better off without having the things which could only instigate hatred and animosity.

[ALRBP]

Be interesting to see stats on what part of the kernel these companies are mostly touching.

Could you do these graphs other parts of the system too? GNOME, systemd, mesa, dbus etc.

Why GNOME ? (and not KDE)
GNOME is not at all a fundamental part of a GNU/Linux system. AFAIK, GNOME is used by a minority of desktop systems, and not at all by server systems.

[bregma]

How valid is the assumption that contributors always use a corporate email address?

I know I've made a lot of contributions to open source projects, but since I change employers I just do it under my own domain. Few people get jobs contributing to the Linux kernel without previous experience. It's not terribly convenient to re-obtain contribution credentials every time you change jobs. It also makes you a target of enmity from people like our gentle readers here on Phoronix if they see you have an email domain that tickles their amygdala in an undesirable way. My guess is most active and successful kernel contributors do not, in fact, use one of the corporate emails to make their contributions, so analyses like these are really just worthless clickbait fluff.

Still, if this argument applies to all employers, then it would be far more meaningful to see a per-capita breakdown of the numbers.

[whitecat]

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

*Installs next project on Ubuntu Server*

Then try to install it on ARM processor, because Intel and AMD actually have even more contribution to the kernel than Red Hat...
LWN.net : Statistics from the 5.4 development cycle

[k1e0x]

Linux isn't under a CLA so no one can "own it".

You sure?

Upstart - dead
Unity - dead
MIR- dead (yes, I know that MIR is still developed but not in the originally intended form)
AppArmor - don't even
snap - we will see how this one will turn out but probably dead after all

Great effort.

RedHat (IBM) competes in mindshare and mindshare controls Linux.

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 - ...

Monopolies are bad things, just look at chrome (opensource) flexing over the internet now that they have 90% market share. All I'm saying here is RedHat (IBM) is far too powerful for a healthy Linux ecosystem.

[mskarbek]

Yeah, but what about the overall commit output of Canonical when adding everything from the following projects that benefited the whole floss community :
Upstart + Unity + MIR + AppArmor + snap (I'm sure I forget some) ?

That's where the overall effort paid off! Everyone should applaud their contribution.

Upstart - dead
Unity - dead
MIR- dead (yes, I know that MIR is still developed but not in the originally intended form)
AppArmor - don't even
snap - we will see how this one will turn out but probably dead after all

Great effort.

[sheepdestroyer]

Yeah, but what about the overall commit output of Canonical when adding everything from the following projects that benefited the whole floss community :
Upstart + Unity + MIR + AppArmor + snap (I'm sure I forget some) ?

That's where the overall effort paid off! Everyone should applaud their contribution.

[Britoid]

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

*Installs next project on Ubuntu Server*

Linux isn't under a CLA so no one can "own it".