London Regional ICT Champion

Interesting stuff over at Tom Slee’s Whimsley, which dissects a new report from the Linux Foundation, documenting how the world’s biggest open source project has shifted during its 17 year life from a volunteer effort to the realm of mega-bucks corporate development.

According to the report, just 4 companies -Red Hat, Novell, IBM and Intel – are responsible for 30% of the “significant changes” made to the Linux kernel or the core of the operating system.

To quote:

“The top 10 contributors, including the groups “unknown” and “none” make up over 75% of the total contributions to the kernel. It is worth noting that, even if one assumes that all of the “unknown” contributors were working on their own time, over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work.

What we see here is that a small number of companies are responsible for a large portion of the total changes to the kernel. But there is a “long tail” of companies which have made significant changes. There may be no other examples of such a large, common resource being supported by such a large group of independent actors in such a collaborative way.”

As Nick Carr observes, web based “social production” or open source projects are “no more immune, or even resistant, to being incorporated into established market systems than any other type of labor that produces commercially valuable goods.”

Quite how the thousands of unpaid volunteers who altruistically contributed their expertise to the development of Linux as a viable operating system feel about this is not documented in the report.

As Tom Slee puts it, “open source has crossed its commercial Rubicon, and there is probably no going back.”