to be fair [LWN.net]

to be fair

Posted Feb 21, 2007 17:03 UTC (Wed) by ccyoung (guest, #16340)
Parent article: Who wrote 2.6.20?

to be fair (and unduly complicated) gnu and Xorg participation should be merged into this. for example, Novell has put a lot of cycles into X, a contribution no less relevant.

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to be fair

Posted Feb 22, 2007 4:42 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

If this was intended to measure the contributions of companies to free software as a whole, sure. But this article had a much narrower (and more achievable) scope.

Linux means two things, really. Sometimes people mean the kernel, sometimes people mean "that bunch of mostly-the-same operating systems we call Linux". This article was about the former.

Linux OS or Linux kernel

Posted Feb 23, 2007 1:35 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

But it's still a good point that the article presents itself as a response to claims such as the one quoted:

Open-source, volunteer-created computer software like the Linux operating system and the Firefox Web browser ...

which almost certainly refer to the whole Linux operating system package, with the GNU stuff, Xorg, KDE, etc., etc.

Numbers for the Linux kernel certainly help to answer the question posed, but it's worth at least pointing out that the kernel is probably one of the less representative samples one could make of the operating system.