[TUHS] [COFF] 386BSD released

joe mcguckin joe at via.net
Fri Jul 16 09:02:02 AEST 2021


I remember going to one of those cattle-call hiring events. I wanted to speak with the Intel compiler guy and when I got up to him, all he said 
was “Ganapathi”.

I actually knew who/what hw was talking about.

So, has Intel killed their own compiler toolset?

Joe McGuckin
ViaNet Communications

joe at via.net
650-207-0372 cell
650-213-1302 office
650-969-2124 fax



> On Jul 15, 2021, at 12:33 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 11:07:10AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>> In fact, [I can not say I personally know this - but have read internal
>> memos that make the claim], Intel pays for more Linux developers and now
>> LLVM developers than any firm.  What's interesting is that Intel does not
>> really directly sell its HW product to end-users.  We sell to others than
>> use our chips to make their products.   We have finally moved to the
>> support model for the compilers (I've personally been fighting that battle
>> for 15 years).
> 
> That claim is probably from the data collected from the Linux
> Foundation, which publishes these stats every year or two.  The most
> recent one is here:
> 
> https://www.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020_kernel_history_report_082720.pdf
> 
> The top ten organizations responsible for commits from 2007 -- 2019:
> 
> (None)		11.95%
> Intel		10.01%
> Red Hat		 8.90%
> (Unknown)	 4.09%
> IBM		 3.79%
> SuSE		 3.49%
> Linaro		 3.17%
> (Consultant)	 2.96%
> Google		 2.79%
> Samsung		 2.58%
> 
> "None" means no organizational affiliation (e.g., hobbyists, students,
> etc.)  "Unknown" means the organization affiliation couldn't be
> determined.
> 
> For more recent data, if you look at the commits for the 5.10 release
> (end of 2020), the top ten list by organizations looks like this:
> 
> Huawei	     8.9%
> Intel	     8.0%
> (Unknown)    6.6%
> (None)	     4.9%
> Red Hat	     5.7%
> Google	     5.2%
> AMD	     4.3%
> Linaro	     4.1%
> Samsung	     3.5%
> IBM	     3.2%
> 
> For the full list and more stats, see: https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/
> 
>> So back to my basic point ... while giving the *behavior* a name, the *idea
>> *of "Open Source" is really not anything new.
> 
> I do think there is something which is radically new --- which is that
> it's not a single company publishing all of the source code for a
> particular OS, whether it's System/360 or the PDP-8 Disk Operating
> System, or whatever.
> 
> In other words, it's the shared nature of the collaboration, which
> partially solves the question of "who pays" --- the answer is, "lots
> of companies, and they do so when it makes business sense for them to
> do so".  Intel may have had the largest number of contributions to
> Linux historically --- but that was still 10%, and it was eclipsed by
> people with no organizational affliation, and in the 5.10 kernel
> Huawei slightly edged out Intel with 8.9% vs 8.0% contributions.
> 
> I completely agree with you that one of the key questions is the
> business case issue.  Not only who pays, but how do they justify the
> software investment to the bean counters?  Of course, the "Stone Soup"
> story predates computers, so this certainly isn't a new business
> model.  And arguably the X Window Systems and the Open Software
> Foundation also had a similar model where multiple companies
> contributed to a common codebase, with perhaps mixed levels of
> success.
> 
> The thing which Linux has managed to achieve, however, is the fact
> that there is a large and diverse base of corporate contributions.
> That to me is what makes the Linux model so interesting, and has been
> a reason for its long-term sustainability.
> 
> Other companies may have been making their source code availble, but
> the underlying business model behind their "source available" practices
> was quite different.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 					- Ted

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