[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

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> Bill's vision of who writes Linux doesn't necessarily match the rest
> of the world's. For a start, it's in large part now written by (and
> hopefully some of it is even tested and maintained by) employees of
> big name corporations, in company time. Much of the rest comes from
> less well known companies.

That's kernel and driver developers. The part of the OS that the user sees-
the apps and most of the gui stuff like window managers etc. is indeed
written by the motley crew mentioned in the email.

> "coders who claimed no company affiliation, or for whom an affiliation
> could not be determined, accounted for just 16.4 per cent of the total
> number of contributions to the kernel. Independent consultants made up
> another 2.5 per cent.

Yeah. That's what I'm saying. It doesn't help much that the kernel is
written by paid people (not all of them qualified btw) if almost everything
else is somebody's hobby code.

> The rest all came from coders working on behalf of companies large and
> small. And while individual contributors seldom made a huge impact on
> the kernel - most made ten or few changes to the kernel over the last
> three years - their combined efforts made a huge difference.
> [snip]
> The report cites Intel, Samsung, IBM, Google, Huawei, Red Hat,
> Freescale, Linaro, Texas Instruments, Marvell, and Nvidia as being
> particularly active in bringing new developers into the fold, in that
> order."

If IBM and Intel supplied the compilers, TI and Freescale designed the
chips, and nVidia did all the GUI, things would be a lot different. Until
then it's just piles and piles of piles running on crapware.

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