I've moved

Thanks for visiting. My blog has moved here.

So who are the top contributors to the Linux Kernel?

Greg Kroah-Hartman of SuSE Labs along with Jon Corbet of LWN.net and the Linux Foundation just published a very informative state of the union of the Linux Kernel development world.

The kernel is one of the largest collaborative software projects on the planet. According to the report, over 3700 individual developers from over 200 different companies have contributed to the kernel since 2005. That's amazing!

I found a couple of very interesting facts in this report - the top 30 contributors and the top 30 organizations sponsoring kernel development.

The top 30 contributors include:
(Reference: Linux Kernel Development Report)

Al Viro
David S. Miller
Adrian Bunk
Ralf Baechle
Andrew Morton
Andi Kleen
Takashi Iwai
Tejun Heo
Russell King
Stephen Hemminger
Thomas Gleixner
Patrick McHardy
Ingo Molnar
Trond Myklebust
Neil Brown
Randy Dunlap
Jean Delvare
Jeff Garzik
Christoph Hellwig
David Brownell
Paul Mundt
Alan Cox
Jeff Dike
Herbert Xu
David Woodhouse
Greg Kroah-Hartman
Linus Torvalds
Dmitry Torokhov
Alan Stern
Ben Dooks

The top sponsors of Linux Kernel development are:
(Reference: Linux Kernel Development Report)

None (developers who are doing work on their own)
Unknown (anonymous contributors doing work on their own time)
Red Hat
Novell
IBM
Intel
Linux Foundation
Consultants
SGI
MIPS Technologies
Oracle
Monta Vista
Google
Linutronix
HP
NetApp
SWsoft
Renesas
Freescale
Astaro
Academia (Universities)
Cisco
Simtec
Linux Networx
QLogic
Fujitsu
Broadcom
Analog Devices
Mandriva
Mellanox
Snapgear

It is pretty cool to learn from the report that 70% of all kernel developers are now getting paid to do what they enjoy the most!

OOXML victory taints ISO credibility

Microsoft’s controversial OOXML private file format was voted in as standard DIS29500 by the International Standards Organization, err… the “I Sold Out” (ISO) this weekend. Amid serious allegations of irregularities in the voting process, political manipulation, cronyism, influence trading and unfair practices employed to secure favorable votes, ISO committees stuffed with inept members representing various countries voted 75% in favor of OOXML.

All for a document format! What a shame to demolish the credibility of such a prestigious standards body. And for a format from a corporation which fiercely opposes competition, cannot tolerate open standards and cannot get over misusing its corporate reach.

The Open Malaysia blog has some interesting stats about the vote.

* 24 out of 32 P-Members (Participating Members) voted in favor of OOXML (75%). The requirement for confirmation is >= 66.66%.
* A total of 61 P-Members and O-Members (Observing and Other Members) voted in favor.
* 10 out of 71 member countries voted against (14%).
* 16 countries abstained and were not counted in the total.

According to noooxml.org , a lot of last minute vote switching occurred due to heavy influence brokering by Microsoft, its subsidiaries and its business partners. This carried OOXML forward to approval. But approval at what cost? Desperate efforts to win by compromising institutional integrity can only backfire and is already leading to erosion of brand credibility for Microsoft around the world. Microsoft is its own worst enemy.

Another report discussing the problems at the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) can be found at Groklaw. Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth has also commented about the process in an interview.

Mozilla turns 10!

Mozilla’s 10th birthday party in SF on March 31st felt like a Netscape reunion. Hundreds of geeks and cat-herders, many with Netscape jackets, shirts, and nostalgia, gathered together to celebrate Mozilla’s phenomenal success. Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich and the Mozilla community were all there to party, to enjoy the cake and to be merry. As the galactic chocolate birthday cake was being cut, Mitchell predicted that many opportunities and challenges lay ahead in the next 10 years and that the greatest achievements for Mozilla are yet to come.

Mozilla has millions of reasons to celebrate. After 500 million downloads, Firefox stands tall as the world’s best free and open source web browser. After 500 million downloads, Firefox has single-handedly turned the tables on IE and has prevented Microsoft from closing the Web. Mozilla is Netscape done right.

Life would be almost unimaginable without Firefox.

Way to go! Mozilla. Live long and prosper.

From OSBC 2008: Open Source and True Innovation

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst delivered the first keynote of the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco with a state of the union on Red Hat’s leadership in open source - $500 million dollars in revenues, millions of servers, thousands of customers. Whitehurst highlighted Red Hat’s leadership in the Linux market with 80 percent marketshare with RHEL and 30 percent of the application server market with JBoss. His speech sounded like it was being delivered to “shareholders” of open source.

The new CEO is not quite 90 days into his job. But he’s been all around the globe - meeting customers, heads of government and policy makers in China, Russia, and Europe. He feels that open source is gaining more popularity internationally due to anti-US sentiment.

Whitehurst explained that one of Red Hat’s key challenges is to bring the value of the open source community development model to enterprise customers. For example, the “oVirt” project for building management tools around virtualization is helping Red Hat engage enterprise customers as participants in building these tools together. Another challenge is for Red Hat to be the defining company of open source for the 21st century - by changing the way technology is developed through “iterative innovation“. Patent reform is one of the biggest issues that Red Hat is currently facing and he hoped to see a broader strategy of protecting the whole community instead of just focusing on individual companies.

From OSBC 2008: Bringing Television to the Web with Open Source

In another interesting keynote at OSBC by Steven Pearson, VP of Advanced Technologies at CBS Interactive, we learned about how deeply open source is being used in his organization. Almost every online property of CBS - CBS.com, CBSSports.com, CBSNews.com, Last.fm - is using open source for their application requirements, ranging from news simulcasts, live election reporting to connecting users who share similar tastes in music and customizing radio streams.

Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, Lucene, Tomcat, PHP, Spring are among technologies that CBS is using heavily. Open source has offered greater ROI for CBS with increase in speed of development, ease of access to source code and documentation, and the ability to enhance source code when needed. CBS Interactive has also contributed back to several open source projects such as CPAN.

The future of open source is bright at CBS with more and more open source projects for the online services that CBS is offering its audiences. Interestingly, Pearson did not feel that competition with other media organizations such as NBC, ABC, and Fox prevents CBS from contributing to open source projects. After all, having content platforms, made robust through open source practices, for delivering ads helps drive up CBS’s revenues.

Support ODF on Document Freedom Day

Keep your data free. Free from vendor lock-in. Support Document Freedom Day on March 26. Activities and events will be held around the world to promote awareness of free document formats such as ODF.

It is great to see that India voted NO for OOXML yesterday. According to Venky Hariharan, 13 members voted "No", 5 members voted "Yes" (including Microsoft India, Infosys, TCS, Wipro and NASSCOM), 1 member abstained and 3 members did not attend.

It appears that revenue partners and their special interests take precedence for India's software export companies over preserving freedom of knowledge and rights of users to share data using open formats. Can money buy standards?

Take a stand and just say no! Support free document formats next week on March 26th. Organize awareness programs in your community, work with your favorite Linux Users Group and support Document Freedom Day.