The Linux Foundation Releases Linux Development Report

SANTA ROSA, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 18, 2015) - LINUX FOUNDATION COLLABORATION SUMMIT -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the immediate release of its 2015 report "Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They Are Doing and Who is Sponsoring It."

This is the sixth such report that is released on a roughly annual basis to help illustrate the Linux kernel development process and the work that defines the largest collaborative project in the history of computing. This year's paper covers work completed through Linux kernel 3.18, with an emphasis on releases 3.11 to 3.18. The last report was released September 2013 and focused on 3.3 to 3.10.

Key findings from this year's paper include:

• Nearly 12,000 developers from more than 1,200 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began 10 years ago. Just since the last report, more than 4,000 developers from 200 companies have contributed to the kernel, half of whom contributed for the first time.
  
  
• The Top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report include Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung, IBM, SUSE, Texas Instruments, Vision Engraving Systems, Google and Renesas. It's worth noting that the FOSS Outreach Program for Women ranks #13 for contributions to the Linux kernel during this last cycle with the interns contributing 1.5 percent of the patches to Linux kernel 3.11. The complete top 20 contributing organizations can be seen in the full report.
  
  
• The rate of Linux development is unmatched; in fact, Linux kernel 3.15 was the busiest development cycle in the kernel's history. This rate of change continues to increase, as does the number of developers and companies involved in the process. The average number of changes accepted into the kernel per hour is 7.71, which translates to 185 changes every day and nearly 1,300 per week. The average days of development per release decreased from 70 days to 66 days.