Jamie Bennett Speaks

Lately there has been a lot of talk about commercial contributions to the Linux kernel, specifically from distribution vendors.

At the Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland, Oregon, Greg Kroah-Hartman of Linux kernel fame recently took a swipe, specifically at Canonical (blog post – google video). Now this may (or may not) come as a shock to you but the most popular Linux distribution (number 1 at distrowatch for many a moon) doesn’t seem to ‘give back’. In retaliation people have come out to defend Ubuntu but this got me thinking, where does Maemo and Nokia stand with regards to Linux kernel contributions?

Well as a avid follower of the OMAP mailing list one can clearly see Nokia’s influence. Many of the major contributors are Nokia employee’s and regularly supply patches and discussion points.

To further solidify my opinion of Nokia’s contributions, this weeks Linux Weekly News (subscription required and highly encouraged) has an article showing the top contributors to the 2.6.27 kernel and right there, at number 5 (by lines changed) is, you guessed it, Nokia.

Now these kind of statistics can’t measure the quality of these patches or their usefulness but it does signal Nokia’s continued work in kernel space. Way to go Nokia.

So maybe this will keep Greg K-H off Nokia’s back, for now at least.