Open source software may be free, but there's still money involved

The Linux Foundation, the non-profit body formed in 2007, has analysed the code commited to the kernel over the past four years to see which developers have contributed how much code, who they're sponsored by and who approves how much code they haven't written themselves. Some of the headline statistics are amazing: The Linux kernel now contains over 11 million lines of code, and over 10,000 patches are applied to produce each new version. With a new version every 81 days on average, that means the kernel is patched once every ten minutes. Since the number of lines of code or patches is a lousy way to measure software quality, these numbers aren't much help beyond having something to wow at.

The rest of the statistics tell you something far more useful about the Linux kernel ecosystem, for want of a better word. For an open source project started by a hobbyist it has an awful lot of corporate backing these days. For the most recent kernel version the stats cover, 2.6.30, there were 1150 developers contributing code from 240 known companies. While some of those coders were working on the kernel in their own time, the report says that over 70 per cent of the work done on the kernel is by people who are paid to do so. Serious money is being spent on employing coders to hack the kernel, and the companies responsible wouldn't do that if there was no money to be made from open source software.

This shows the open source model works. Companies that pay developers to work on the code get back more than they put in. No one company gets to dominate the contributions, or to say what goes in and what doesn't, and everyone gets the same access to the finished product. Open source software isn't anti-commercial, and it doesn't even just sit alongside commercial software. It is commercial software, written by profit-making companies, and these numbers prove it.