3 ms·
Linux is written almost entirely by employees of for-profit companies: http://lwn.net/Articles/451243/ http://lwn.net/Articles/451243/ Many core Python contrib
by jbellis 15y ago
Linux is written almost entirely by employees of for-profit companies: http://lwn.net/Articles/451243/ http://lwn.net/Articles/451243/
Many core Python contributors including Guido are employed by companies like Google to work on it.
Mozilla is, technically, an exception: almost everyone is employed by the Mozilla corporation, a non-profit by virtue of its lucrative search deal with Google. Few projects have that luxury.
- cousin_it 15y agoThanks! I stand corrected.
- celticjames 15y agoSomething like 40% of Mozilla code is written by community contributors, which is quite remarkable. How many of those non-employees are paid by someone else specifically to work on Mozilla I don't know. i.e. I don't know if IBM pays people to work on Firefox they way they pay people to work on Linux.
- einhverfr 15y agoTwo points: 1) To work full time on something like Linux, it really requires an external employer. So it isn't surprising that this is the case. To get involved does not, and certainly for a long time independent developers were as important as corporations there. 2) Everyone economically owns the output. I don't mean the copyrights. I mean everyone has a right to put the software to use for whatever purposes they want, whether in manufacturing, say, server appliances, or just running a web site (or even on my wife's laptop). If the big companies stopped contributing to Linux tomorrow, would Linux die? I doubt it. So I suppose it depends on what you mean by "dependent." Certainly Linux is not dependent on corporate coding the way, say, Windows is.....