GNOME Census
July 28, 2010 11:15 am General(Reposted from Neary Consulting)
Today at GUADEC I presented the results (Slides are now on slideshare) of the GNOME Census, a project we have been working on for a while. For as long as I have been involved in GNOME, press, analysts, potential partners and advisory board members have been asking us: How big is GNOME? How many paid developers are there? Who writes all this software, and why?
By looking at the modules in the GNOME 2.30 release, made last March, we aim to answer many of those questions, and give deeper insight into the motivations of participants in the project.
The GNOME heartbeat - pre-release peaks and GUADEC boosts
Here are our key findings:
- GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC
- While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors
- Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.
- A number of top company contributors are consultancy/services companies specialising in the GNOME platform – Collabora, CodeThink, Openismus, Lanedo and Fluendo are in the top 20 companies. As many of these companies grew initially through work on Maemo, this is a sign of the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.
| Company | Commits | Percentage |
| Volunteer | 101823 | 23.45 |
| Unknown | 73558 | 16.94 |
| Red Hat | 70790 | 16.30 |
| Novell | 45349 | 10.44 |
| Collabora | 21684 | 4.99 |
| Intel | 11160 | 2.57 |
| Fluendo | 10218 | 2.35 |
| Lanedo | 10090 | 2.32 |
| Independent | 8922 | 2.05 |
| Sun | 8862 | 2.04 |
| Nokia | 6183 | 1.42 |
| Openismus | 5303 | 1.22 |
| Codethink | 5276 | 1.21 |
| Eazel | 4734 | 1.09 |
| Litl | 4620 | 1.06 |
| Canonical | 4487 | 1.03 |
| Movial | 2988 | 0.69 |
| Mandriva | 2504 | 0.58 |
| The Family International | 2130 | 0.49 |
| Entropy Wave | 2056 | 0.47 |
| (Academia) | 1894 | 0.44 |
| Mozilla Corporation | 1040 | 0.24 |
One of the interesting things that we have done for the census is to look at who is maintaining modules by looking at commits over the past two years, and use this data to identify areas of the platform which see lots of collaboration, areas where the maintenance burden is left to volunteers, and areas where individual companies assume most of the maintenance burden.
There are a number of modules in the platform which see a considerable amount of co-opetition, including Evolution, Evolution Data Server, DBus and GStreamer. Most modules in the platform, however, are either maintained to a large extent by volunteer developers, or see the vast majority of their contributions from one company.
I see this information being useful for companies interested in using the GNOME platform for their products, companies seeking custom application development, potential large-scale customers of desktop Linux or customers buying high-level support who want to know who employs more module maintainers or committers to the project.
- The GNOME maintenance map, with modules coloured according to the company maintaining them
Update: Two significant omissions in the maintenance map were pointed out to me. After correctly associating a number of commiters to a company, Lanedo is responsible for 16.5% of the commits in GTK+ over the past two years, and volunteers are also responsible for at least 17%. Red Hat are still the largest contributor, with 32% of all commits to the module. libsoup is maintained by Dan Winship, who left Novell to join Red Hat in 2007, where he developed and maintains the module.
Update 2: As I announced in this post, the report is now available as a free download via neary-consulting.com licensed as Creative Commons by-sa 3.0
July 28th, 2010 at 11:49 am
I didn’t see BlueZ and WebKit in that last maintenance map.
July 28th, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Eh, Canonical contributed to gcalctool. Way to go !
July 28th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
“Eh, Canonical contributed to gcalctool. Way to go !”
What a shame! They’re even attending GUADEC… I would wear a mask, at least.
July 28th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
And don’t forget default-icon-theme
July 28th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
> the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.
Didn’t they switched to Qt like Intel and others too?
July 28th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
This is great!
Why other modules are not present? Such as totem or banshee.
Thanks!
July 28th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
[...] Dave Neary [...]
July 28th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
totem is in upper left corner;) maintained by redhat
July 28th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by sankarshan and Cody Russell, Zuissi. Zuissi said: Planet Gnome: Dave Neary: GNOME Census: (Reposted from Neary Consulting) Today at GUADEC I presented the results (… http://bit.ly/d4UDeF [...]
July 28th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
Graph tells us how important is to be a part of GNOME Project and to understand its important in our life cycle.
Rajesh Shah
July 28th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
[...] much to the Linux Kenel”. Mark Shuttleworth defended the company. In 2010 we see, in GNOME census report, that only 1.03% of commits in GNOME come from Canonical employees. I think it’s not much [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 5:23 am
[...] Posted in fedora by Greg DeKoenigsberg on July 29, 2010 In case you missed it: $SUBJECT is the percentage of contribution to the GNOME codebase. Thanks, Dave [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 6:22 am
[...] El censo de Gnome [EN] blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/ por jjm hace 3 segundos [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 6:42 am
[...] Neary has posted the highlights of his work to determine where contributions to GNOME come from. “While over 70% of GNOME developers [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 6:45 am
[...] David Neary nos contesta a la pregunta en GNOME Census. [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 6:53 am
[...] » noticia original [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 7:37 am
[...] Hat contributions to Gnome Via this rant, I learned about this report, which shows who contributes the most to the Gnome project. I knew that Red Hat was doing a lot [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 7:50 am
[...] GNOME Census Today at GUADEC I presented the results (Slides are now on slideshare) of the GNOME Census, a project we have been working on for a while. For as long as I have been involved in GNOME, press, analysts, potential partners and advisory board members have been asking us: How big is GNOME? How many paid developers are there? Who writes all this software, and why? [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 9:02 am
I only convinced that proprietary software is a best way of development. Maybe i’l go to hell for this, but good luck to Microsoft bandits and Apple thugs…)
July 29th, 2010 at 9:57 am
m4, that’s totem-pl-parser, not totem
I also miss Rhythmbox.
July 29th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
[...] was delighted to see that the GNOME Census presentation I gave yesterday at GUADEC has gotten a lot of attention. And I’m pleased to announce a [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
[...] LINKS BLOG DE GREG DEKOENISBERG ESTADISTICAS DE CONTRIBUCIÓN A GNOME DESDE EL AÑO 2002 [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Hugh, I’m totally blind, totem is there o_O
July 29th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
[...] succint as I can, as this kind of thinking has gotten me in Big Trouble before, but commenting on Dave’s blog post got me thinking. Has Ubuntu, really, been [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Comments about Canonical: You forget that Red Had has magnitude of more employees then Canonical. Canonical has about 200 to 300 employees. But don’t forget Canonical sponsored many conferences and also paid upgrade for Gnome outdated version control system – to better integrate into Lauchpad.
July 29th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
The graph incorrectly lists pkg-config as maintained by Collabora. While it’s true that I’m the maintainer of pkg-config and that I am employed by Collabora, it’s not my Collabora hat that does the maintenance. (I’m sure they’d be happy to let me maintain it during work hours, it’s just never come up.)
If there’s a next time, it’d be useful to use the same approach as LWN uses, which is to ask each committer how they wish to be counted so you could have avoided this mistake.
July 29th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
[...] the blog itself is based on a recent presentation by Dave Neary of GNOME regarding contributions, or lack thereof, by FOSS companies and individuals [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
[...] Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » GNOME Census [...]
July 30th, 2010 at 3:39 am
[...] Earlier this week at GUADEC, the always affable Dave Neary presented his GNOME Census work. Unfortunately, I was not there to see it, but I read his excellent post on the topic. [...]
July 30th, 2010 at 6:35 am
Is this data over the lifetime of the GNOME repositories or just a snapshot of a few recent years? (I only ask because Eazel is on there and I thought they were most active around 2000)
July 30th, 2010 at 9:31 am
[...] discussion is quite on the roll after Dave Neary gave some insight into who commits how much code to the GNOME [...]
July 30th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Hi Dave,
It would be interesting to hear what you use as a definition of Gnome. In the slides 12-14, I see a list of contributors to modules that I have to question if they are part of Gnome at all: swfdec, gstreamer, pulseaudio, libxml2, libxslt.
As far as I know, these are all infrastructure libraries or plugins, and are used just as much by KDE and other desktop environments.
In slide 22 you actually list some of these as external dependencies along with lots of other modules (including, interestingly enough, clutter).
So what is the list of modules that in your mind makes up Gnome?
July 30th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
[...] The GNOME census reported that while Red Hat contributes 16% of the upstream changes to GNOME, Canonical only contributes about 1%. Naturally, this has triggered an epic flame war, with Red Hat partisans arguing that Ubuntu is building its success off Red Hat’s work, while Ubuntu partisans argue that Ubuntu has succeeded in popularizing the Linux desktop in way that Red Hat has failed to do. [...]
July 30th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
[...] la Guadec que se está llevando a cabo hasta el día de hoy, se ha presentado un censo en el que entre otros temas se da a conocer las contribuciones al código del proyecto [...]
July 30th, 2010 at 6:30 pm
[...] might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.At GUADEC, Dave Neary presented the results of the GNOME Census. The results reveal some very interesting findings. Around 70% of the developers identify [...]
July 30th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
[...] Neary has posted the results of the GNOME census which has been looking at contributions to GNOME, who develops what, where it’s coming [...]
July 30th, 2010 at 8:00 pm
[...] o dia de hoje na Holanda a conferência GUADEC 2010. Em uma das palestras, Dave Neary apresentou um censo das contribuições ao Gnome (apresentacão em Slideshare). O estudo se baseia nas mudanças realizadas no Gnome 2.30 (sem [...]
July 30th, 2010 at 10:10 pm
[...] doesn’t contribute back” argument cropped up again when Dave Neary released a report of the talk he gave at GUADEC on the contributions made to the GNOME desktop environment. He found [...]
July 30th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
[...] doesn’t contribute back” argument cropped up again when Dave Neary released a report of the talk he gave at GUADEC on the contributions made to the GNOME desktop environment. He found [...]
July 31st, 2010 at 9:05 am
[...] realizadas en GUADEC 2010 ha destacado una en la que se han presentado los resultados del llamado GNOME Census, una iniciativa que trata de evaluar entre otras cosas la participación de usuarios y empresas en [...]
July 31st, 2010 at 9:29 am
[...] Se siete interessati a vedere le varie percentuali e altri dati andate su GNOME Census. [...]
July 31st, 2010 at 9:54 am
[...] یکی از سخنرانان کنفرانس امسال در مورد آمار گنوم صحبت کرد و اینکه گنوم را چه کسانی میسازند؟ و چه شرکتهایی پشت گنوم هستند؟ و آیا برنامهنویسان گنوم بابت انجام این پروژه پولی دریافت میکنند یا نه؟ [...]
July 31st, 2010 at 11:34 am
[...] ist durch den Gnome-Census deutlich geworden, dass Canonical nicht nur im Kernel-Bereich, sondern auch bei der Entwicklung des [...]
August 1st, 2010 at 9:20 am
[...] writes “The GNOME Census, a project to see who contributes to GNOME and how, has released its first set of results. The results group people by their reasons to contribute code, what they contributed code to, and [...]
August 1st, 2010 at 11:39 am
Canonical contributed alot of new users to the linux world, don’t forget this value.
August 1st, 2010 at 11:49 am
From OMG ubuntu: “Jono Bacon agrees that more commits come from Red Hat but denies that Canonical don’t contribute to open source as a whole. He suggests that applications like Simple Scan, Computer Janitor and the Hardware Drivers tool “could bring real value to GNOME, but they have not been accepted.”"
August 1st, 2010 at 12:33 pm
[...] just read about Dave Neary’s presentation on the GNOME Census. Given the data, most of what I think is exactly what he wrote on the slides or the blog post. But [...]
August 1st, 2010 at 1:11 pm
I don’t like Ubuntu and think a percent is a miserable portion of contribution of code.
However, if you look at how many *users* have been contributed to Gnome then perhaps Canonical is in a better light, huh?
I’m on FVWM and wouldn’t care, but I use a lot of Gnome apps and libs so the data is interesting. Just don’t be too wedded to it.
August 1st, 2010 at 1:29 pm
[...] just read about Dave Neary’s presentation on the GNOME Census. Given the data, most of what I think is exactly what he wrote on the slides or the blog post. But [...]
August 1st, 2010 at 1:48 pm
> Didn’t they switched to Qt like Intel and others too?
Yep, Nokia and Intel switched to Qt. But they still have plenty of legacy gnome applications to support (the old Maemo and Moblin stuff).
August 1st, 2010 at 3:26 pm
[...] Confira os gráficos e detalhes: http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/ [...]
August 2nd, 2010 at 4:32 pm
Where can we download the slides ? (*hint* slideshare requires you to login to do so)
August 2nd, 2010 at 7:29 pm
[...] Dave gave his talk at GUADEC my comment was “this is a partial view, commits are not everything”, I was [...]
August 3rd, 2010 at 12:02 am
[...] Neary presentó dicho censo el pasado 28 de julio, y la conclusión más llamativa para muchos fue el hecho de que Red Hat [...]
August 3rd, 2010 at 5:23 am
[...] Neary presentó dicho censo el pasado 28 de julio, y la conclusión más llamativa para muchos fue el hecho de que Red Hat [...]
August 3rd, 2010 at 1:34 pm
[...] can see this in the GNOME Census, recently completed by Dave Neary of Neary Consulting. Red Hat is by far the largest contributor, [...]
August 3rd, 2010 at 8:40 pm
[...] GNOME Census (Safe as [...]
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:52 pm
[...] bloc Safe as Milk han fet una ullada a les contribucions del GNOME per veure qui contribueix al seu desenvolupament. [...]
August 3rd, 2010 at 10:36 pm
[...] адрес компании Canonical. Работа в том, что внове проект GNOME опубликовал суждение о вкладе компаний в течение проект GNOME. Как оказалась, [...]
August 4th, 2010 at 8:18 am
[...] Neary ha da poco pubblicato i risultati dello “GNOME census“, una sorta di censimento di tutte le forze che interagiscono per tenere in vita uno degli [...]
August 4th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
[...] developer Dave Neary has posted his GNOME Census results, and, especially if you’re a fan of GNOME, it’s worth checking his data out. Here are [...]
August 6th, 2010 at 8:32 pm
[...] GNOME Census This article caused a huge commotion in the GNOME community especially with respect to Canonical. I [...]
August 7th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
[...] as important in building the commons and its market as what’s up-front. You can see this in the GNOME Census, recently completed by Dave Neary of Neary Consulting. Red Hat is by far the largest contributor, [...]
August 9th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
[...] doesn’t contribute back” argument cropped up again when Dave Neary released a report of the talk he gave at GUADEC on the contributions made to the GNOME desktop environment. He found [...]
August 22nd, 2010 at 6:51 pm
[...] адрес компании Canonical. Дело в том, что недавно проект GNOME опубликовал отчёт о вкладе компаний в проект GNOME. Как оказалась, вклад [...]
September 2nd, 2010 at 7:48 am
[...] Neary has posted the results of the GNOME census which has been looking at contributions to GNOME, who develops what, where it’s coming from [...]
September 2nd, 2010 at 4:41 pm
[...] Census (for 1.9) By vignatti Topic’s name is a funny (and friendly) devotion to GNOME Census. So let’s take a look at some numbers from the time Xorg 1.9 was in development – raw [...]