[twntaipan]

At the end of the day these companies work on the Linux kernel in order to make money off the product. They understand that improving the kernel for all will benefit themselves as well. GE will probably be along shortly to deny all of this, but the facts are pretty evident.

[Man50D]

Bookmark for later.

[xcamel]

[ShadowAce]

[TOWER]

Yes, as a guy whose only social life is playing D&D, I admit that I did not have any part in the creation Linux.

[MichiganMan]

1) Red Hat, 11.2 percent 2) Novell, 8.9 percent 3) IBM, 8.3 percent 4) Intel, 4.1 percent 5) LF, 3.5 percent 6) SGI, 2.0 percent 7) MIPS Technology, 1.6 percent 8) Oracle,...

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At the end of the day these companies work on the Linux kernel in order to make money off the product. They understand that improving the kernel for all will benefit themselves as well. GE will probably be along shortly to deny all of this, but the facts are pretty evident.

Jeez, ALL these companies are in league with the Chinese government? Damn socialists!

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

In fact, the top five developers, Al Viro (1.9 percent of the total percentage of changes to the kernel); David Miller (1.8 percent); Adrian Bunk (1.7 percent); Ralf Baechle (1.6 percent); and Andrew Morton (1.5 percent), alone accounted for 8.5 percent of Linux’s recent code changes.

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Fred Brooks (The Mythical Man Month) is proven correct yet again. His thesis has always been that a few key people are what drive big engineering projects, and that adding people to a project can slow it down instead of speed it up.

Or put another way, if a woman can make a baby in 9 months, it’s not true that 9 women can make a baby in 1 month.

[Born Conservative]

Who Really Creates Linux?

Algore?

[Turbopilot]

So how do these companies make money off the product? AFAIK it’s a breach of the usage license of Linux to sell it (although I have no idea who’d sue you for it). I get the idea of competitive collaboration to improve a product, but if the product can’t be sold, why are these companies paying people to work on it?

[Mr. Jeeves]

Some people are still under the delusion that Linux is written by unwashed hackers living in their parents' basements whose only social life is playing D&D and having flame wars over IRC (Internet Relay Chat) about whether vi or EMACS better and debating Picard versus Kirk.

Written, no - just advocated by. ;)

(Sorry, I'm an OS/X advocate...)

[GovernmentShrinker]

It was inevitable that the geeky kids churning out code in their parents’ basements would grow up and get paying jobs.