Who writes most of the Open Source software — including Linux?

Microsoft & Google are ‘neck-and-neck‘ for the top spot — \o/ ‘Hippity hip Hoorah‘ \o/ — then comes #3 Red Hat, #4 Intel, #5 Amazon Web Services (AWS), and last but not least #6 IBM. Mostly all are companies *HATED* by the radical ‘n vocal Linux regular users. Regular users are what Linus Torvalds calls ‘normal people‘, and says Linux isn’t made for them to use, i.e., it’s mainly made for ‘Technical people’ such as Developers, Programmers, Sysadmins, IT Specialists, Maintainers, etc. Regular users are mainly the guinea pigs who test Linux desktops for free—without realizing it. 😉

Many of the regular Linux users are beyond being just ‘Fanatics‘ so I enjoy clowning around wid ‘n about them 🤡. Heck, Linux has never even mastered the ‘basic Wheel Mouse‘:

Many regular Linux users are shocked when I tell them about what the mouse can’t do in Linux. 🤡 They thought that ‘Point & Click‘ was all a mouse was made to do. Developers, Programmers, Sysadmins, IT Specialists, Maintainers, etc. use the keyboard mostly—hence Linux being a ‘A terminal-centric‘ OS.

  • OK, enough bashing of regular Linux guinea pigs users. 🙈🙉🙊

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a great article out at The RegisterWho writes Linux and open source software?:

Developers and, more to the point, the companies that employ them

Even now, I run into those who think Linux and open source software is made by people living in their parents’ basement and writing the code out of the goodness of their hearts. Wrong. So, so wrong.

Yes, even now, some people write open source code to scratch an itch or just because they enjoy it. But if you look closely, you’ll find that the vast majority of today’s open source programmers do it for the same reason you do your job: money.

Snip .. Aiven, an open source cloud data platform company, recently analyzed who’s doing what with GitHub open source code projects. They found that the top open source contributors were all companies – Amazon Web Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft.

Microsoft!!? Yes, Microsoft. I know, I know, you’ve been raised up to spit at the very name, and many of you still continue to think Microsoft is the Evil Empire.

(Microsoft also owns GitHub ‘n has done a great job wid it!)

Folks, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, neither of whom had any love for open source or Linux, haven’t been calling the shots at Microsoft for almost a decade. This is not your dad’s Microsoft. In short, get over it.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols gives some great info in this MUST READ article! Microsoft has been helping Open Source & Linux ever since Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella took over.

Linux is also a great secondary OS for normal people, and I maintain a semi-retired blog on it, as a ‘Hub‘ here: Linux Newbie – since 1996.

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