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