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Comment by robk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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 .

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

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