Companies writing open source

I read an interesting article linked from Slashdot the other day entitled “Who wrote 2.6.20?“, which details the approximate percentage of code that people and companies had contributed to version 2.6.20 of the Linux kernel using various metrics based on lines of code (while this may not be a perfectly accurate representation of the amount of work that went into the contributions, it is at least an approximate measure).

I found it particularly interesting that over 65% of the code was contributed by companies (see the article for how this was measured), which shows that a lot of people are paid to write open source kernel code.

If you’re interested, as I am, in writing open source kernel code for a living, I would suggest checking out the companies that contributed a large percentage of code according to the article. Of course this should not be your only way of determining who to work for. I would also consider how much of this code is useful to the general public versus how much is specific to a certain piece of hardware that most people don’t use.

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