Monday, January 17, 2005

Development communities

I recently read either a copy of Linux now a corporate beast or something similar. (It wasn't that one exactly, but either repeated elsewhere or a different article making the same point - that the Linux [kernel] development community is small and corporate.)

The interesting thing is the following:

“People’s stereotype [of the typical Linux developer] is of a male computer geek working in his basement writing code in his spare time, purely for the love of his craft. Such people were a significant force up until about five years ago,” said Andrew Morton, whose role is maintaining the Linux kernel in its stable form.

Morton said contributions from such enthusiasts, “is waning.” Instead, most code is generated by programmers punching the corporate time clock.


Bother.

OK, so I'm male, but wouldn't quite call myself a geek. I don't have a basement, but my involvement with is definitely for the love (and fun) of it. I'm definitely not punching the corporate time clock on this one.

Of course, even with OpenSolaris being opened up, I would expect most of the changes - for quite a while - to be from Sun employees. Those same employees who are writing Solaris at the moment. I'm just hoping to be able to find some small way to contribute.

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