It seems that one of the most frequent arguments Linux propagators pull on the unsuspecting, capitalist-ruled public, is gone down the drain with this latest announcement. During a recent presentation at Linux.conf.au in Wellington, Johnathan Corbet, LWN.net founder and kernel contributor, shared a bit of statistics on just where the code comes from.

From December 24th 2008 to January 10th 2010, Linux has gotten a total of 2.8 million lines of code and 55,000 major changes have been done on the “free man’s OS”. 18% percent of these contributions were made by volunteers and 7% isn’t classified. The remaining 75% of the code however, has been written by “people [who were] paid to do it,” Corbet says.

The mere fact that Linux averages in getting more than 7,000 lines of code each day speaks volumes on the users’ devotion to the OS, but it doesn’t change the fact that they haven’t been doing it for free and/or because they like to. Our (Red) hat is off to those who indeed do it for free, whereas the rest will simply have to rethink the open-source community praise routines and face the bitter "no pay no play" truth. 

More here.