FREE, BUT VALUABLE

Linux turns 25, is bigger and more professional than ever

Just 7.7% of devs are unpaidbecause Linux development is worth paying for.

Athanasios Kasampalis

JON BRODKIN - 8/22/2016, 5:56 PM

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The Linux operating system kernel is 25 years old this month. It was August 25, 1991 when Linus Torvalds posted his famous
messageannouncing the project, claiming that Linux was "just a hobby, won't be big andprofessional like gnu."

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But now, Linux is far bigger and moreprofessional than Torvalds could have imagined. Linux powers huge portions of the Internet's
infrastructure, corporatedata centers, websites, stock exchanges, the world's most widely used smartphone operating system, and
nearly all of the world's fastest supercomputers. The successes easily outweigh Linux's failure to unseat Microsoft and Apple onPCs,
but Linux has still managed to get on tens of millions of desktops and laptops and Linux software even runs on Windows.
As its importance has grown, development of Linux has steadily shifted from unpaid
volunteers to professional developers. The 25th anniversary version of the Linux Kernel
Development Report, released by the Linux Foundation today, notes that "the volume of
contributions from unpaid developers has been in slow decline for many years. It was 14.6 percent
in the 2012 version of this paper, 13.6 percent in 2013, and 11.8 percent in 2014; over the period
covered by this report, it has fallen to 7.7 percent. There are many possible reasons for this decline,
but, arguably, the most plausible of those is quite simple: Kernel developers are in short supply, so
anybody who demonstrates an ability to get code into the mainline tends not to have trouble
nding job offers."

FURTHER READING
Linux has 2,000 new developers and
gets 10,000 patches for each version

FURTHER READING
Google and Samsung soar into list of
top 10 Linux contributors

Torvalds himself oversees development of the kernel as an employee of the nonprot Linux Foundation, which is funded by contributions from
corporations and individuals.Linux is important enough to the bottom line of major technology companies that they don't mind employees
contributing to the kernel on their employers' dime. Intel and Red Hat led the way in corporate contributions to the kernel fromDecember 2014
to July 2016:

Linux Foundation

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"[E]ven if one assumes that all of the 'unknown' contributors are working on their own time, well over 80 percent of all kernel development is
demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work," the report said.Asmall number of companies are responsible for a large
portion of development, but more than 400 companies "made signicant changes" in the period covered by the report. Though volunteer
developers are declining, 2,355 developers contributed for the rst time, out of about 5,000overall. Most of the new developers contributed on
behalf of their employers.
There were nine new versions of the kernel in the period studied by the report, with about one-third of developers contributing just one patch to
each new version. But some individuals have contributed hundreds since December 2014:

Linux Foundation

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Torvalds doesn't show up on the list, as he and other senior kernel developers spend their timereviewing changes submitted by other developers
and routing accepted patches toward the mainline kernel. There's been an increased focus on security lately, including support for hardwarebased security features from Intel and ARM and work on "hardening the kernel to prevent attackers from taking over the system even when an
exploitable vulnerability is present," the report said.

The development model has been ne-tunedover the years so thatthe release cycle is quite predictable, with a new version coming out every
nine or 10 weeks. But the numbering schemewhich jumped from version 3.19 to 4.0 in April 2015 and is now up to 4.7isharder to predict,
unless your name is Linus Torvalds.
"The release of the 4.0 kernel, ending the 3.x series, was not indicative of anything in particular beyond the fact that the minor numbers were
getting large and Linus Torvalds was 'running out of ngers and toes,'" the report said. "Every kernel release is a 'major' release with signicant
changes; the numbering scheme no longer matters much."

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daneren2005 wrote:
I would also argue that the kernel has reached the point of good enough for most. 20
years ago I might have contributed to the kernel because it would be an interesting
project to work on. Today the kernel just runs for the most part and the work which
needs to be done on it is grueling and not very interesting IMHO.. Trying to reverse
engineer drivers is a good example. I would much rather work on user-land projects
which solve an interesting problem such as a browser extension to make my life easier
or a pokemon bot or a thousand other things.
20 years ago I contributed to the kernel because there was this caching IO board that
apparently no one else in the world was using and I wanted to. Today i feel condent in
upgrading my daily driver to the latest LTS kernel without bothering to read the changelog.
Usually.
1063 posts | registered 9/6/2014

JON BRODKIN
Jon is Ars Technica's senior IT reporter, covering the FCC and broadband, telecommunications, wireless technology, and more.
EMAIL jon.brodkin@arstechnica.com // TWITTER @JBrodkin

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