Very interesting article. However, I am thinking that not all the Linux kernel commits are sent to the GitHub cloud. Linux has its own Git cloud and probably GitHub independent. Except some��backups on neighbour clouds. Also the factors mentioned in their study does not necessarily��indicate that the developments were open- free- and linux focused: "the number of contributors, repositories (projects) contributed to, and the number of commits made by the contributors". I know many private and��commercial software packages that store and push their developments on GitHub and GitLab. So I doubt the study can safely summarize that major commercial giants are "really" supporting the open-source culture. Pretty similar to giant commercial companies who donate part of their tax to the social institutions!



On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 1:04���AM Peter Reutemann <fracpete@waikato.ac.nz> wrote:
'From an opinion piece in the Register:

Aiven, an open source cloud data platform company, recently analyzed
who's doing what with GitHub open source code projects. They found
that the top open source contributors were all companies ��� Amazon Web
Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft....

Aiven looked at three metrics within the GitHub archives. These were
the number of contributors, repositories (projects) contributed to,
and the number of commits made by the contributors. These were
calculated using Google Big Query analysis of PushEvents on public
GitHub data. The company found that Microsoft and Google were
neck-and-neck for the top spot. Red Hat is in third place, followed by
Intel, then AWS, just ahead of IBM.... Red Hat is following closely
behind and is currently contributing more commits than Google, with
125,012 in Q4 2022 compared to Google's 94,961. Microsoft is ahead of
both, with 128,247 commits. However, regarding contributed staff
working on projects, Google is leading the way with 5,757 compared to
Microsoft's 5,513 and Red Hat's 3,656....

Heikki Nousiainen, Aiven CTO and co-founder, commented: "An unexpected
result of our research was seeing Amazon overtake IBM to become the
fifth biggest contributor." They "came late to the open source party,
but they're now doubling down on its open source commitments and
realizing the benefits that come with contributing to the open source
projects its customers use." So, yes, open source certainly started
with individual contributors, but today, and for many years before,
it's company employees that are really making the code....

Aiven is far from the only one to have noticed that companies are now
open source's economic engine. Jonathan Corbet, editor-in-chief of
Linux Weekly News (LWN), found in his most recent analysis of Long
Term Support Linux Kernel releases from 5.16 to 6.1 that a mere 7.5
percent of the kernel development, as measured by lines changed, came
from individual developers. No, the real leaders were, in order: AMD;
Intel; Google; Linaro, the main Arm Linux development organization;
Meta; and Red Hat.

The article also includes this thought-provoking quote from Aiven
CTO's. "Innovation is at the heart of the open source community, but
without a strong commitment from companies, the whole system will
struggle.

"We can see that companies are recognizing their role and supporting
all who use open source."'

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/02/26/1950212

Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ
Mobile +64 22 190 2375
https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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