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!

Connecting Eyeballs

In his keynote at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at Google, Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth focused on the importance of collaboration. For Mark, collaboration inspires innovation and tools and processes that help collaboration are key to maintaining the edge of innovation in FOSS. I couldn't agree with Mark more. Mark observed that barriers to collaboration include too many interfaces to communicate with, rigid community structure management, attitudes of "us vs. them", poor project management, and insufficient standardization. He said that while there are many collaboration techniques and tools WITHIN global open source projects, there are not many ACROSS these projects. Many of his efforts try to connect islands of eyeballs through the tools the Ubuntu community is building - Launchpad, Bazaar, Rosetta, UbuntuForums. Otherwise, a lack of tools and standards across projects are hampering bug tracking, submission of translations & patches and testing. He cited the GNOME project as a great example of communication across projects especially in helping downstream developers.