The Linux Foundation Releases Development Report Highlighting Contributions to the Linux Kernel Ahead of 25th Anniversary of Linux

TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - August 22, 2016) - LINUXCON + CONTAINERCON -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced the immediate release of its 2016 report "Linux Kernel Development - How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It". The report comes just days before the 25th anniversary of the initial release of the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds on August 25, 1991, and analyzes the work done by over 13,500 developers over more than a decade, as well as more recent trends.

This is the seventh 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 4.7, with an emphasis on releases 3.19 to 4.7. The last report was released March 2015 and focused on 3.11 to 3.18.

Key findings from this year's paper include:

• Over 13,500 developers from more than 1,300 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since the adoption of Git made detailed tracking possible. Since the last report, just shy of 5,000 developers from 400 companies have contributed to the kernel; nearly half of these developers contributed for the first time.
• The Top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report include Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung, SUSE, IBM, Renesas, Google, AMD, Texas Instruments and ARM. The Outreachy program, which provides open source internships to underrepresented groups, ranks #13 for contributions to the Linux kernel during this last cycle with the interns contributing 1.4 percent of the patches since Linux kernel 3.18. The complete top 30 contributing organizations can be seen in the full report.
• The rate of Linux development 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 7.8, up from 7.71 in the last report, which translates to 187 changes every day and nearly 1,310 per week. The average days of development per release remained steady at 66 days, with every release spaced either 63 or 70 days apart, providing significant predictability.
• The number of unpaid developers continues its slow decline, as Linux kernel development proves an increasingly valuable skill sought by employers, ensuring experienced kernel developers do not stay unpaid for long. The volume of contributions from unpaid developers in the period covered by this report has fallen to 7.7% from 11.8% in 2014.

The report is co-authored by Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel developer and editor of LWN.net, and Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation fellow.