BIG TECH makes LINUX. Is that a problem?

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#linux #bigtech #linuxkernel

00:00 Intro
00:40 Sponsor: Extend the life of your PHP Applications
01:29 Linux is built by companies
04:28 Linux Governance: mostly big companies
07:26 Open Source is the ultimate accountability solution
09:17 Mutually assured destruction
11:04 Torvalds is no corporate shill
12:14 Is it really a problem?
13:18 Sponsor: Get a device that runs Linux perfectly, with Tuxedo
14:13 Support the channel

If we start with the Linux kernel, in 2020, for version 5.10, there were almost 2000 different contributors, only 252 of which shared their first contribution. 228 companies also contributed work, and the top 20 companies contributed 70% of the changes in the kernel itself. THe biggest contributors? Huawei, Intel, Red Hat, Google, but we also see Facebook, Oracle, and Samsung in there.

https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/

But this doesn’t mean that all the code these companies want to push, is accepted. The code is signed off on by subsystem maintainers and reviewers. And we see that big companies also have a hand on code validation, with Red Hat, Facebook, Google and Huawei being among the biggest.

Linux as a project, doesn’t really have a roadmap. It’s not like people meet in a boardroom to decide what they’ll focus on next. People just propose their work, and it’s either accepted, or not. So, companies who contribute have their own roadmaps, that require them to add some code to the Linux kernel, and this code kinda becomes the roadmap of the kernel itself.

The Linux Foundation is a big actor in how Linux is shaped and where it goes. And if we look at the board of directors for the Linux Foundation, we find a lot of big companies again: Sony, Intel, Huawei, Tencent, Meta, IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, Oracle, and more.

So, we come full circle: however well managed and structured the linux kernel development is, at every step, the code is written by people working for big companies, and big companies employ the maintainers who approve the code, which in turn is approved by Torvalds, who works for the Linux foundation, which is controlled by the board of directors, made up of employees of big companies. But is that really a problem?

Well, Linux might be mainly developed by people working for big companies, but it’s still open source. You can still fork it, you can still grab the code, modify it, and redistribute it. And you can also look at the code, and detect all that shady stuff.

Which means the minute anything remotely weird, privacy invasive, or limiting to users makes it to the kernel, you’ll get an immediate fork, or at least a new kernel version being distributed which removes all that crap.

Also important to remember: these big companies don’t contribute just for fun. They contribute what they want or need to make their own products, services, and businesses run.

And it also works as some kind of mutually assured destruction: if a company ever wanted to add some crappy code to the kernel, it would hurt its competitors who also use Linux. So these guys would oppose the patch, or refuse to let it through. And the company would probably end up being banned from contributing at all.

And also, Linus Torvalds is the ultimate gatekeeper on the kernel: what goes in or not, goes through him. And fortunately, Torvalds is aware that corporate involvement can be tricky to handle. In a interview he gave in 2021, when being asked about financial sustainability, he says he has always been wary of being too tainted by commercial interests. He said that he didn’t want to work for a Linux company to avoid that and stay as a neutral party. He also knows that it’s not easy to work with companies and that they don’t know how to do open source in a lot of cases.

https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-open-source-and-beyond-part-2

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