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Yea, my guess is NetBSD outdoes it...

You might want to compare it with

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/User-Group-HOWTO-1.html

Actually, no. In the OLS keynote address, Greg Korah-Hartman of Novell made the claim that Linux has surpassed NetBSD in its support for hardware. (http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html)

Still, I have to admire the NetBSD guys for creating a kernel that's been ported to as much hardware as it has, and with 1/1000th (plus or minus my imagination) of the developers as Linux. Plus, I love their slogan: "Of course it runs NetBSD." Apt.

Edit: Whoops. That would be the same person making the same claim at an early presentation he's given.

Edited 2008-07-15 05:15 UTC

Great slideshow thanks.

It doesn't apparently by most counts, but Linux is only a kernel, NetBSD is a full operating system. This means that you can build the same userland for all supported platforms. Or even better, you can cross-compile NetBSD on one platform for virtually all platforms. And cross-compiling is initiated by just one build.sh command.

It isn't funding. It is people hacking on their own time. As a organization, Red Hat is on the top

http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/04/08/red-hat-leads-open-source-co...

Correct and more to the point, the combined Corporate funding with hiring coders and more is the bulk of the work.

From the article:

"# Who's funding Linxu kernel development ?

1. Amateurs 18.5%
2. Red Hat 11.6%..."

He says "funding" suggesting financial, not code, conributions. Or is he equating the two? In either case, it remains surprising that amateurs outrank all others.

Possibly because Canonical are more concerned with user-space issues than kernel-space ones? Many of the bigger kernel changes seem to be to get it working well on big-iron or embedded systems, which is not the main space where Canonical have operated (although that may be changing).

That the kernel does not concentrate on desktop issues is sort of a myth. There are tons of desktop specific work happening. Take a look at the latest release were webcam drivers are getting merged as just one item. Ubuntu is ignoring this process to a large extend and patching their kernel pretty heavily.

http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/127218.html

I doubt they are fairing much better in terms of user space patches including major projects like GNOME.

This isn't whining and there is no incentive to help them if they continue to ignore upstream and take up crappy patches. There is merely pointing out some facts with references and pretty much no code was submitted to upstream ever. If you notice the number one category of contributors are purely hobbyists and there are hundreds of different organizations contributing so claiming that the code was not accepted because it didn't come from Red Hat shows massive ignorance. Whether or not the license allows them to do that is a entirely different question and something that was never questioned. Moral obligations are different from legal obligations.

Edited 2008-07-15 10:09 UTC

Currently Launchpad is holding more than 1700 kernel related bugs:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux

Maybe Canonical doesn't directly pay kernel devs, but Ubuntu endorses lots of kernel development. Canonical is just an easy target because they're so well-known. But they're definitely not the same kind of company as Red Hat and shouldn't be viewed as such. Seeing their "Engineering" web page clearly proves that they're just getting started.

http://www.canonical.com/services/engineering

But seeing how they boast themselves about contributing to Linux tastes a little wrong, if GHK is just half right about his claims:

http://www.canonical.com/aboutus/contributions

But only 6 contributions!? Aaaaah, something's got to be wrong here.

You are correct, there is something wrong.

http://blog.phunnypharm.org/2008/07/canonical-and-linux-kernel.html

That is not to say that Canonical contributes nearly as much as the Redhat team or others, but the numbers GregKH gave are inaccurate.

NetBSD is the most portable OS. That is, it's designed to be easily ported to different hardware platforms. Linux is the most ported, but it's a lot more work to do so.