The subject of the last post, the Forum on Technology and Innovation, came to mind because I attended the Open Source Software event last July, and recently had reason to refer to the Transcript.

All the speakers were interesting, but I was particularly struck by Andrew Morton, who, as Lead Maintainer of the Linux Production Kernel, had some no-nonsense things to say about Linux, both what it is and what it is not.

Some key points:

"Nowadays, most of the core open source software developers are full-time employed professionals and contributing to public software projects is part of their job description." (Tr. 7)

During the past three years, 38,000 changes have been made in the kernel by 1,000 contributors, with half of the changes coming from a core group of 20 people. (Tr. 8) Linux has less than 100 developers who are significant contributors. (Tr. 73)

For many of the "most successful open source projects," there is not much intellectual property value involved. They represent decades old technologies, and participating companies are simply consolidating around a particular implementation so they "can concentrate their innovation, their resources, and their investment at a higher level of the software stack." (Tr. 49)

Security problems in the Linux kernel are fixed "in a flash." But generally speaking, studies indicate that resolution rates for open source and proprietary software are about the same. (Tr. 63)

The IT industry uses open source as a way of "pulling resources towards a software commons," and "the GPL is the glue there which prevents it from fragmenting" in the same fashion as the old Unix. (Tr. 66)

The risk of someone putting a malicious piece of code into the Linux kernel are almost non-existent. Nothing goes in that is not understood by Morton or one of the inner circle. (Tr. 70)

UPDATE: See the ADDENDUM to Gamesmanship, posted Oct. 18, 2004.

posted by James DeLong @ 3:06 PM | General

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