During a friendly exchange with one of our readers this afternoon, the topic of code contributions came up. I think that Red Hat contributes more code to the open source community than Novell. Iko Chang disagrees.
I decided to research the topic a bit, so I downloaded the latest Linux kernel source archive from Kernel.org, and extracted it to a folder. I then went to the terminal embedded in my desktop, and changed to that directory. I used a combination of find, xargs, grep and sed to find out how many times the phrases “Red Hat” and “Novell” were used in the kernel source files. The results? The phrase “Red Hat” occurred 726 times, while “Novell” occurred only 68 times. Here’s a PDF with the commands I used and the files in which the phrases were found.
Is this definitive proof of anything at all? No, but it should at least get you thinking.
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