According to Wikipedia by employee count Red Hat (7500) is 10x the size of each of SUSE (750) and Canonical (700) but the SUSE and Canonical numbers cited are a few years out of date.
Anyone have more up to date numbers or other ways to characterize overall size or contribution to open source? Am also curious whether SUSE or Canonical do any public policy, perhaps just as a side effect of selling to governments. Red Hat apparently has a "Global Public Policy" department though there's little info about it on the web. In theory a larger entity can reap more benefits of policy activity including lobbying, so will do more of it.
I don't have any good answers to that, sorry. I know that SUSE and Red Hat worked together on the live-kernel-patching stuff just shipping with kernel 4.0 and work together on a number of other open source projects as well.
There is no denying the size of Red Hat, and thus its influence. I'm just thankful there are other out there doing the good work as well.
