Financial Times on Linux’s Worldwide Army

If you haven’t seen today’s Financial Times article on Linux development and the Linux Foundation, take a look.

Alan Cane does a nice job of explaining the rapid rate of change and innovation happening in Linux today:

“The Linux kernel releases every three months with new functionality. There are 2,000 lines of code added to the kernel every day; 2,900 lines of code are changed every day. There are more than 2,900 core contributors to the Linux kernel. The world has never seen such a sophisticated, broadly spread, rapid development model.”

He points out that “distributions” of Linux - the Linux kernel together with complementary software to create complete operating systems and which are packaged by commercial companies - are released every six months compared with the seven years it took Microsoft to release Vista, the latest version of Windows.