Hacker News Reader

> Further, the fact that so many of those maintainers are purely on volunteer time.

Greg pointed out in that email thread that:

> over 80% of the contributions come from company-funded developers. [1]

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2025020738-observant-rocklike-7...

Is that really the right statistic? Seems like the relevant one would be the number of maintainers whose maintenance work is company-funded. (Ex, I'd imagine it would be quite bad if most contributions were from company-funded developers but had to be upstreamed by non-company-funded volunteers.)

From other discussion in that thread, it does appear that most maintainers are employed by companies to work on Linux. That doesn't mean that all the work these maintainers do is paid, as there are also comments indicating that many of these paid contributors do work on their own time when it doesn't align with their company priorities.

I posted that statistic to demonstrate that the kernal project isn't a typical underfunded, almost purely volunteer open source project as implied by many of the kneejerk comments here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com