Microsoft contributes a lot of changes to Linux kernel 3.0

The 343 changes made by Microsoft developer K. Y. Srinivasan put him at the top of a list, created by LWN.net, of developers who made the most changes in the current development cycle for Linux 3.0. Along with a number of other "change sets", Microsoft provided a total of 361 changes, putting it in seventh place on the list of companies and groups that contributed code to the Linux kernel. By comparison, independent developers provided 1,085 change sets to Linux 3.0, while Red Hat provided 1,000 and Intel 839.

The figures were published on Thursday in an LWN.net article which is available exclusively to subscribers until this coming Thursday (21 July); however, bloggers have already commented on the figures. LWN.net has produced similar analyses for all of the recently published kernels, including 2.6.39 and 2.6.38. Author, kernel developer, and LWN.net founder Jonathan Corbet has conducted such surveys in cooperation with the Linux Foundation and published them as studies. In that context, The H pointed out that you have to be careful in interpreting the numbers. One bone of contention is that the analysis also covers changes in the staging area, which contains code that does not fulfil the quality standards of its developers and of kernel developers; a large number of changes are made to produce these required improvements.