Linux: The Revenge of Ronald Coase
Tom Slee writes:
Whimsley: Linux Grows Up and Gets a Job: One of the highlights: "over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work". 14% is contributed by developers who are known to be unpaid and independent, and 13% by people who may or may not be paid (unknown), so the amount done by paid workers may be as high as 85%. The Linux kernel, then, is largely the product of professionals, not volunteers.
So Linux has become an economic joint venture of a set of companies... participating for a diverse set of commercial reasons. Some want to make sure that Linux runs on their hardware. Others want to make sure that the basis of their distribution business is solid. And so on, and none of these companies could achieve their goals independently....
This does not mean that Linux was always a commercial venture, or that all open source projects are commercial ventures.... Open source started off as a small-scale set of projects done mainly by volunteers. As the scale and scope of open source projects an increasing number have provided their contributors with some money (augmented perhaps by a waitressing job). Now a few of the most successful have hit the big time and become full-scale economically important commercial enterprises.
Things change. As open source software has matured and expanded it has become both more unlike the rest of the world and more like it. It will be fascinating to see what comes next, but the Linux Foundation report has made clear that open source has crossed its commercial Rubicon, and there is probably no going back.
