"... An effort supported by for-profit companies paying their employees to work on the codebase. No profit, No money, no Linux ..."
Is the work done bespoke or in support of some company objective? Is the work done critical for support or done for PR reasons?
The increasing size of the Linux kernel is due to
the incorporation of significant new features,
including a file system optimized for solid-state
drives and support for the 64-bit ARM microprocessors
(your link)
It is ludicrous to suggest that corporate largesse alone is responsible for the Linux kernel. Without the non for profit work, I'd dare say you'd be working on/with your enhanced MS-2014 Pro Servers software or some BSD variant on a VT100 terminal.
OpenSSL is another example of open source that is widely used. A lot of companies use it, make money off it yet few contributed resources. A lot of companies also got burned when a critical bug was discovered (re-discovered) [0][1] the Heartbleed bug... did the NSA exploit this?. [1]
>Is the work done bespoke or in support of some company objective?
Both.
>Is the work done critical for support or done for PR reasons?
Yes, the work is critical to the project. PR reasons? What? Its trivial to check what kind of code they're committing.
>It is ludicrous to suggest that corporate largesse alone is responsible for the Linux kernel.
Why? It is ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
Do you realize the scale of operations for a project like Linux? Do you know who is paying for all the hardware compatibility testing? You don't just say "it works on my machine" and call it a day. Linux isn't an amateur OSS project. You need to make sure that after every single release, the code actually works on the 94,000 different Motherboard/CPU/GPU/RAM/BIOS combinations. Redhat, Novel, Oracle, etc fund all of this.
>Without the non for profit work, I'd dare say you'd be working on/with your enhanced MS-2014 Pro Servers software or some BSD variant on a VT100 terminal.
And without the proprietary design of UNIX to copy, would an OS like Linux even exist? See? Using hypotheticals to reason is a pointless exercise.
>OpenSSL is another example of open source that is widely used. A lot of companies use it, make money off it yet few contributed resources.
Way to shoot yourself in the foot. OpenSSL needs funding precisely because of the heartbleed bug. It demonstrates that the lack of money in an OSS project can result in a less than optimial quality product.
>Even if those donations continue to arrive at the same rate indefinitely (they won’t), and even though every penny of those funds goes directly to OpenSSL team members, it is nowhere near enough to properly sustain the manpower levels needed to support such a complex and critical software product.
Is the work done bespoke or in support of some company objective? Is the work done critical for support or done for PR reasons?
It is ludicrous to suggest that corporate largesse alone is responsible for the Linux kernel. Without the non for profit work, I'd dare say you'd be working on/with your enhanced MS-2014 Pro Servers software or some BSD variant on a VT100 terminal.OpenSSL is another example of open source that is widely used. A lot of companies use it, make money off it yet few contributed resources. A lot of companies also got burned when a critical bug was discovered (re-discovered) [0][1] the Heartbleed bug... did the NSA exploit this?. [1]
The real reason for-profit companies have to give back code, the GNU GPL: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html
[0] "Neel Mehta of Google's security team reported Heartbleed on April 1, 2014" ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed#Discovery
[1] Kim Zetter, Wired 'Has the NSA Been Using the Heartbleed Bug as an Internet Peephole?' http://www.wired.com/2014/04/nsa-heartbleed/