Who wrote Linux Kernel 2.6.20? | Hacker News Reader

Who wrote Linux Kernel 2.6.20?

lwn.net

91 pointsvinutheraj19 comments

I've always been curious who are these people who commit so much personal time on open source projects (instead of doing rounded corners kind of web 2.0 work) and I googled Jeff Garzik, seemingly the most productive developer during this release:

http://linux.yyz.us

Notice that even his home page is all about his projects as opposed to self-promotion.

Compare that to the douchebag Seth Sternberg (http://bit.ly/1m9PTZ), who built a company on top of libpurple's team open sourced work, bragged about building "from nothing to something" and didn't even mention them in TC article, preferring to speak about his "desire to build the next great thing" buillshit instead.

i'm sure many startups rely on open-source projects that they don't bother mentioning. while i wouldn't call it nothing, libpurple is just a c library for abstracting IM protocols. there's still a lot of other work to be done to turn that into a fully scaled web service.

A lot of work was invested in libpurple too in order to implement (reliably) all the protocols.

Not to mention the fact that many of those protocols had to be reverse engineered.

From 2007. Try this:

http://lwn.net/Articles/348445/

Interesting that the statistics haven't changed a whole lot over the course of 2 years - except that the unknown category is way smaller.

2.6.20 is relatively old, of course; I've done this research for every subsequent kernel as well. If you go to the LWN kernel index (http://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/) and look under "releases", you'll find the stats for each kernel release.

There's a longer-term version of this research available from the front page of the Linux Foundation's site as well.

It's disappointing that Google isn't more prominent on that list given their dependence on open source in so many places and having acquired such deep talent over the years.

Good catch. Under the heading, "...Looking instead at the number of lines of code changed," Google doesn't even appear in the list.

This is just one project (albeit a prominent one). Google might be contributing to a lot of other projects. I hope that companies do contribute across the board, and not just to high-profile things like the kernel.

You guys know that Andrew Morton works at Google right?

From TFA: Google's changesets: 97. Andrew Morton's changesets: 92.

Good PR move to hire Andrew, but those 5 submitted changesets he didn't author is a pretty meager upstream output of Google's rather large kernel team.

What about Summer of Code? http://code.google.com/soc/

"Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide"

What about http://code.google.com for free project hosting?

What about "Google has released well over a million lines of code and over 100 projects"? (from http://code.google.com/opensource/)

What about Chrome, Android and Andrew Morton?

The research mentioned in the above article was actually done by Greg Korah Hartman. He did this for a google tech talk , you can view it over here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2SED6sewRw .

What? Only five businesses ranked higher than Google in number of changesets, and all of them are companies that (unlike Google) distribute their own versions of Linux to customers.

Fourteen businesses rank higher than Google in the most recent (2.6.31) report; most or all of them are Linux distributors or hardware vendors. (Note: I'm not counting none, unknown, academia, consultant, or the Linux Foundation as businesses.)

Compare this to other web companies like Amazon, Yahoo, and Facebook. They use Linux just the same way Google does, but they sponsored zero lines of code identified in this report. [Greg K-H gently chastised Amazon about this when he did a tech-talk there on Linux development.]

For the record, Google also distributes its own version of Linux to customers, whereas Amazon and Facebook do not. It'd still be nice to see them contribute, of course.

As for Yahoo, it runs on FreeBSD, actually. They provide hosting to the FreeBSD project, though I don't know if they write any code.

That's true, I forgot about Android. Are there any other Google Linux distributions that I missed?

Note that Amazon also distributes a custom embedded Linux system on the Kindle.

Replace Yahoo (oops!) with some other web site operator. It doesn't matter which, since not one of them contributes as much as Google. :)

Google Search Appliance.

Related, "Linux Kernel Development Stats from Greg Kroah Hartman": http://bit.ly/1rutJD

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