There's an interesting point hiding in the virulence of this post: Canonical engineers work on Ubuntu. Red Hat and SUSE have historically hired swaths of "ups

There's an interesting point hiding in the virulence of this post: Canonical engineers work on Ubuntu. Red Hat and SUSE have historically hired swaths of "upstream" developers, often just to work on their own projects and propel Linux along. When I visited an Ubuntu Developer Sprint a few years ago, as a former KDE developer, I was surprised at how few people I knew. It wasn't that they weren't engineers; it was simply that they were working on Canonical projects: Ubuntu, Launchpad, Rosetta, etc., not j-random-OSS-project. The interesting thing is that they've been trying to hire more upstream folks. Most core OSS developers don't have a problem finding a job. They've also been at this a relatively short period relative to Red Hat (and SUSE), so there's would be no surprise, even if the hiring practices were similar, that the total commit count would be far smaller.