Without much fanfare or self-congratulations, networking giant Cisco Systems has become one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and an active contributor to the broader open source community.

The Linux world makes much of its community roots, but when it comes to developing the kernel of the operating system, it's less a case of "volunteers ahoy!" and more a case of "where's my pay?".

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.

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.

As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I'm starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here's my opinion on the whole matter...

Google’s Android code will assume its rightful place in the Linux kernel — in good time, the company’s top open source guru says. The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org.

The Linux Kernel community has a proven track record of being in disagreement with - and disconnected from - the academic operating system research community from the very beginning. The famous Torvalds/Tannenbaum debate about the obsolescence of monolithic kernels is just the starting point of a long series of debates about various aspects of Linux kernel design choices."

As the central element of Linux, the kernel is equally central to open source software in general. Because the community has such a stake in its design and success, the kernel has proven to be the hub around which much discussion revolves. The kernel's creator, Linus Torvalds, also has a stake in its success, and he takes part in the discussion.

Jan is one of silent community mebers that is active in kernel packaging and development area. Thanks to him openSUSE users have had chance to try stable real time kernel (RT kernel).