75% of Linux code now written by paid developers
The Linux world makes much of its community roots, but when it comes to developing the kernel of the operating system, it's less a case of "volunteers ahoy!" and more a case of "where's my pay?"
During a presentation at Linux.conf.au 2010 in Wellington, LWN.net founder and kernel contributor Jonathan Corbet offered an analysis of the code contributed to the Linux kernel between December 24 2008 and January 10 2010. (The kernel serves as a basis from which individual distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian or Red Hat are developed, though these will often add or remove specific features.)
A massive amount of coding went on in that period: 2.8 million lines of code and 55,000 major changes were contributed to the kernel, which evolved from version 2.6.28 to 2.6.32 over that time. "The development process is clearly quite alive and quite active," Corbet said, noting that this amount to more than 7,000 lines of code added every day.
The most striking aspect of the analysis, however, was where those lines of code originated from.
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re:75% of Linux code now written by paid developers
I fail to see the point of this rant. I was under the impression that the linux kernel was licensed under the GPL.
If that's the case, who cares if the developers are being paid. Them being paid doesn't change the GPL requirements, does it? I don't think so. You or I can still take the kernel source code and view it, modify it and use it any way we wish.
Is not the author of the article being paid to write?
The amount of code being written for the kernel would seem to require full time attention, how would you expect to eat and pay your bills if you work full time for free?
re: Paid dev's
Don't you listen to Stallman and his hippie rants?
Paid developers are in bed with Satan - yes SATAN.
There is no way you can have totally free code (free as in mindless) with paid developers.
This has APOCALYPSE written all over it - run everyone run (and remember - totally "free" people only run with their shoes and socks OFF and their hair unfettered and FREE).
It's not a rant
Why does it necessarily has to be a rant to hit the net? To the contrary the article is a pretty boring presentation about who is contributing what, and plainly stating that the Linux kernel isn't a project of volunteers. The only criticism comes in the end and no then against those paid developers and the ones who feed them, but against companies who don't support Linux and who's drivers hence have to be reversed engineered.
Why vonskippy is rambling about Stallman and hippies doesn't make any sense at all. Maybe he's listening to Greateful Dead and got too stoned to read the article?