As reported in the last issue of Linux Executive Report, the majority of contributions now to the Linux kernel are coming from developers paid for their work, and in fact, 75% of code contributions to the Linux kernel between December 24, 2008 and January 10, 2010, came from people paid to do it by a range of companies including Red Hat, Novell and IBM.
And, now a new study finds a similar trend for KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), a virtualization solution that is part of the mainline Linux kernel. The KVM effort has become increasingly active over the past year, thanks to the efforts of a range of organizations.
In an article at ServerWatch.com, Sean Michael Kerner notes that an IBM study, which examined the project's mailing list to gauge activity, found that there were 884 unique participants, roughly equivalent to the number of active KVM developers. Kerner says this data helped Mike Day, chief virtualization architect at IBM, determine the top four contributors to KVM. Red Hat tops the list with 9,471 messages out of a total 18,303 messages, representing nearly 52% of list traffic for 2009, IBM ranks second with 1,382 messages or 8% of the KVM developer list traffic, and Novell and Intel round out the list with approximately 5% each. Kerner notes that Day's findings show that organizations that participate in KVM range from large corporations, to government and educational organization, in addition to individual contributors.
Read Kerner's article, "Who Is Developing KVM Linux Virtualization?"