Red Hat tops list of corporate Linux code contributors
by Colin Dodd
Red Hat tops list of corporate Linux code contributors – Software Development Times On The Web
September 18, 2008 — When it comes to donating code to Linux, Red Hat is the company that contributes the most, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the USB and other subsystems in the Linux kernel.
Speaking at the Linux Plumbers Conference, he gave a keynote address that examined the contributions of those who’ve made Linux what it is today. All of these lists tracked contributions as patches, not initial donations to Linux.
The overall largest contributions to Linux code come from individuals who have no apparent affiliation with any company, as Kroah-Hartman surmised by looking at their e-mail addresses. Red Hat came in second overall, with 11,846 patches.
By comparison, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is the 79th most active contributor, with 100 patches. Kroah-Hartman said that such behavior on the part of Canonical will be detrimental to the company and the Ubuntu distribution over time.
“Then there are the distros that base themselves off of other distros, like Ubuntu and [Lance Davis'] CentOS. These distros have yet another layer between them and the original developers. Patches rarely, if ever, flow backwards into an upstream distro, and the developers are very unlikely to push their changes into the upstream packages as they don’t feel the need or don’t realize the issues involved as they rely on the upstream distro so tightly,” said Kroah-Hartman.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I think he is being too hard on Ubuntu and Centos. They are not so much distros as repackaging – only somewhat removed from a DVD distributor (more so for Ubuntu which provides significant system repackaging). As a developer, I send patches and bug reports to the original package maintainer – which is often independent of distro. Repackaging projects fill a need, customizing installation and updates to particular use cases. Currently, I’m looking for an RPM based distro that supports audio and MIDI recording and mixing with low latency out of the box. I see Fedora is heading in that direction.