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Comment by d3m0t3p | Hacker News Reader

You can check company names too ! It's interesting to see that by default, the graph shows google,apple. But adding meta, and IBM really changes the plot.

Meta went from 2K to 10K+ from 2018 to 2025. While IBM seems to have stopped contributing in 2008. Since they the merging with RedHat, I would have expected to see them increase again but none of RedHat / IBM seems to have increase. https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#redhat,oracle... Not sure if their name appearing means that they are contributing tho.

Really cool project,

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Meta is not just a company name. Look at how it's used:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atorvalds%2Flinux%20meta&t...

I wonder if there's anything not referring to IBM that matches that search. Add them and you'll see that they soar over all others.

All the mentions of "IBM PC"? "HP" seems to follow closely behind too (Dell is nowhere close though but comparable to "redhat").

Add "arm" in and it's a different ballgame: they are more than 2x anybody else, Meta and IBM included.

Mostly goes to say that this doesn't really show much :)

LWN publish better stats for every kernel release - the most recent (for 6.15) can be found at https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414/

So RedHat were the third largest employer by number of changesets (after Intel and Google), IBM were 15th - but, by number of lines changed, they were 5th and 4th respectively.

It's talking about occurrences of the word, not contributions. That's a really lousy way to measure corporate contributions.

IBM is contributing a lot. LWN publishes development statistics after each kernel release: https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414/. IBM was 5th in terms of lines changed, 17th in terms of changesets, 20th in terms of signed-of-by counts. That's alongside the contributions by Red Hat which was higher in all but lines-changed terms.

> Meta went from 2K to 10K+ from 2018 to 2025

Facebook rebranded to Meta in October 2021

But why have Apple contributions skyrocketed? I have never heard of Apple using Linux in anything.

This is mentions of Apple in the source code, not contributions, and non-Apple people have added lots of support for Apple hardware over the years.

The recentness of this makes me wonder if this is Asahi contributions.

Apple is Berkeley Unix-based, while not actually Linux it's possible their contributions to open source have made it's way into Linux (me guessing, no real experience of either Linux or Mac).

Could also be that there's been work done to communicate with Apple specific products, again wild guesses but based on my perception of people working with Apple products is that there might be above average number of "edge cases" that needs addressing when communicating with those.

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