According to a recent report conducted by the Linux Foundation, Red Hat has been recognised ahead of open source advocates IBM and Novell as the most active contributor to the ongoing development of the Linux Kernel.

No surprise, but Red Hat remains the top corporate Linux kernel contributor, as reported by SDTimes. As I've reported before, Red Hat is the top Linux contributor by a wide margin, with IBM, the next biggest corporate contributor, coming in nearly seven percentage points behind Red Hat.

Yesterday Julie Bort wrote in the NetworkWorld site an interesting post called “Cisco doesn’t contribute nearly enough to open source”, where she contends that “”[despite its] .. proclaims it responsible for a half percent of the contributions to the Linux kernel (0.5%). In reality, Cisco has been a near non-entity as an open source contributor”.

In 2007 Red Hat stood on top of the Linux kernel contributor list with room to spare. At 12.7 percent of the Linux kernel contributed by Red Hat. In 2009, things get more interesting, with Intel making a serious challenge to claim the top spot in Linux kernel contributions.

Open source is looking more attractive to software development managers who need to make their budgets stretch farther, as the enterprise can benefit from FOSS community's contributions. Here's how to participate in open-source projects and measure developers' success.

While most Linux users are fine with just using the kernel supplied by their distribution vendor, there are some enthusiasts and professional users who end up tweaking their kernel configuration extensively for their needs, particularly if they are within a corporate environment where the very best performance and reliability is demanded for a particular workload.

Two days ago, Netgear has announced the so-called "Open Source" WNR3500L router, together with an equally "Open Source" MyOpenRouter community.

The problem with this Open Source router is: It ships with binary-only kernel modules. Not only is this extremely Closed Source, but it also

Does motivation matter? Open source contributors are increasingly people who are paid to work on open source. GNOME contributor Lucas Rocha asks how this impacts communities over the long term. This is not a new question by any stretch.

If you have coding skills and want to use them to develop open source software you have several options. You can start a new project by yourself or with some friends, or you can join an existing project. The advantage of the former is that you get to make the rules and there is a pretty good (i.e., 100%) chance that your code will be accepted.