Who writes the Linux kernel?

An informative post over at LWN (via Matt Asay) about the code contributed to the 2.6.20 kernel, followed by the last year of kernel changes. The result? As far as companies go, Red Hat is by far in the lead as far as both number of changesets and number of lines go. Other top names are what you would expect: Novell, IBM, Linux Foundation, Intel, Oracle, etc. It's good to see that Red Hat can now back up the claim that they are doing a significant amount of work in the kernel space. It's interesting to note that “Unknown” is in first and “None” in third. The definitions are: “the line marked “(Unknown)” is exactly that: patches for which existence of a supporting employer could not be determined. The line marked “(None)”, instead, indicates the patches from developers known to be working on their own time.” That does give credence to the often mentioned statement that some real percentage of kernel work is done by volunteers. The article also looks at individual contributions. If kernel hacking is something you're interested in, the full article is something you'll want to read. LWN continues its tradition of putting out quality in-depth articles like this and is worthy of your support.
–jeremy