The newest version of the Linux kernel, 2.6.30, went out into the wild on the 9th. I took a peek at the "what's new" document and saw plenty of evidence that the kernel's becoming a place where Big Software has come to contribute.

Many of the contributors to the 2.6.30 kernel are familiar, since they've been long-time Linux players: Red Hat and IBM, most prominently. But other folks like hardware makers (Intel, Atheros, Xilinx) and entities who've been using Linux as part of their own infrastructure (NTT) show up in the contributor list.

In fact, out of the fourteen "prominent" features described in 2.6.30, only three are credited directly to individuals. The concept of the lone hacker in his basement hand-assembling the code that'll change the world is a pretty romantic vision, but it's less true now than before for a variety of reasons.

For one, the sheer complexity of hardware and operating systems makes it that much more difficult for a single person to create the kind of game-changing achievements we used to see. In the Seventies, it was not all that hard for a couple of guys to create something like UNIX on the PDP-7 and PDP-11, since the hardware was that much simpler. The Linux kernel may originally have been one man's project, but there's little question it requires the combined effort of a great many people, each working on specific aspects of it, to move it forward. Many of those responsible are big companies, who -- surprise -- actually have a major investment in Linux.

None of these are bad things. They're just the most explicit symptoms of how things have moved forward since the origins of open source -- something talked about a great deal recently, what with UNIX's 40th birthday having come about.

But the truth is plain: it's not the same computing world as when the original crop of open sorcerers (yes, I know, bad pun, I had to use it) came along.

InformationWeek Analytics has published an independent analysis of the current state of open source adoption. Download the report here (registration required).

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