The Linux Ecosystem, what it is and where do you fit in it?

A few months ago I gave a talk at Google about the Linux kerneldevelopment process. During that talk, someone asked me aboutCanonical's kernel contributions as they did not show up on the listthat I was showing.

I offhandedly remarked that they did not show up as they had onlycontributed 5-6 patches in the past few years. Now this comment didn'tgo over very well with the Ubuntu developers, and they called me out onit as they felt it was wrong.

They were right, I was wrong, so here is my public apology.

In the past 3 years, from the 2.6.15 kernel to 2.6.27-rc6, Canonicalhas had 100 patches in the Linux kernel.

I appologize about my previous statement and would like the world toknow the correct number here.

But as the Canonical employees seemed so eager for me to get the numbercorrect, let's look a bit closer at it. What does 100 patches reallymean?

From the 2.6.15 kernel release to the present, there have been 99324patches made to the Linux kernel.

So, to place Canonical's contribution into perspective, that means theydid 00.10068% of all of the kernel development for the past 3 years.

They are ranked 79th of all companies doing kernel development, withsuch prominate notable Linux supporters like nVidia just barely beatingthem out.

If Canonical was an individual contributor to the kernel, it would be in195th place.

Their individual contributors end up placing in the following locationsbased on their number of contributions 251, 714, 1103, 1327, 1691, 1691,2171, 2171, 2171, 2171.

Now to be fair, this is only basing things on quantity, not quality, sothose 100 patches might be major contributions to the kernel, advancingthe state of the art and fixing major bugs that affect thousands ofpeople. I'll let all of you make that call.

And finally, lest anyone think I'm picking on Canonical for somereason, here's how they rank within all of the different Linux distros.

Hm, wait, I forgot one non-profit distro that I like a lot, Gentoo,let's add them into the list:

I tried tracking Debian kernel contributions, but as most of the Debiandevelopers don't use a debian.org email address, it is hard, but Iguessed and looked at who they list as their kernel team, combined witha few email addresses that do use a debian.org address and came up withthe following best guess which is probably still not properly countingeverything the Debian developers do:

Ok, that should set the record straight for how many patches Canonicalhas allowed their engineers to contribute back to the kernel community.

So, back to the Linux Ecosystem.

Wait, what do we mean here by "Linux"?

When we first discussed having a Linux conference composed of kerneldevelopers and the developers of the surrounding "base system" ofprograms, we had to come up with a name for all of that. Someoneproposed the term "Plumbing", so we named the conference, the "LinuxPlumbers Conference".

Here's a diagram of what I consider to mean the basic description of a"Linux" system:

I've left some things out here, scripting languages that we all use toboot strap some of these programs when building them, or running startupscripts, but these programs make up the core of what a "Linux" systemis. The majority of them only run on Linux systems, while a few, gcc,binutils, make, run on all operating systems, and also make up the baseof the BSDs and even openSolaris.

Let's look at the size of these different programs, based on lines ofcode as measured by SLOCCOUNT from David Wheeler:

The largest is the kernel, making up 40% overall. That's followed bygcc, and then X11. Then binutils, glibc, ALSA, and then man-pages (wecan't forget documentation!).