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> Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement; Which is why Linux is primarily corporate funded. The corporates want to sell their hardware. To sell the
by rstuart4133 2y ago
> Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement;
Which is why Linux is primarily corporate funded. The corporates want to sell their hardware. To sell their hardware they need to get it running on Linux, so they fund that. As hardware support constitutes most of the code contributions, most of the code that goes into Linux was because corporate actors made a decision to pay for it's development - purely in their own interests.
That's nice - this symbiosis between FOSS and corporates works well for both sides. But it's a stretch to say Linux would not exist today without it. The most you can say for certain is Linux would not have it's great hardware support without it. The BSD's don't get anything like the amount of corporate funding Linux does. They are doing fine, and notably work on common modern hardware. So could Linux even without corporate funding.
In particular, most of the interesting stuff that happens in the kernel, the stuff that determines what the kernel will look like in 10 years time, stuff like adopting Rust, is driven by people scratching itches in the FOSS tradition. Not all of it - pKVM is Google initiative. But eBPF was scratching an itch. Jens Axboe developed io_uring probably as a consequence of wanting storage to run faster at Meta - but it was definitely an itch of his. It's nice that Meta to paid him while he developed it, but saying its creation was "driven by corporate interests at Meta" is a bit of a stretch.