At LinuxCon, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said that “Linux has gone far beyond what anyone could have imagined” and that it is the “most successful software project in history.”
Is he right?
Over the past 15 months, more than 3 million lines of code have been added to the Linux kernel. For those of you who don't understand the magnitude of coding, that's 7.8 changes per hour.
Since the release of 3.18 on December 7, 2014, 115,000 changesets have been merged by 5,062 individual developers representing nearly 500 companies. The top developers working on it are at Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung, and SUSE. Thousands of developers continue to work on Linux independently of the major companies.
Over 80 percent of all kernel development is done by developers who are paid for their work. The number of unpaid developers has been steadily shrinking in recent years. It was 14.6 percent in 2012, 13.6 percent in 2013, and 11.8 percent in 2014. Today, the number has dropped to 7.7 percent. The number has decreased because kernel developers are in very high demand. Anyone who demonstrates the ability to write code for the mainline kernel of a given operating system should have no problem finding a job.
In the last year and a half, there have been many significant improvements to Linux:
- Live patching support.
- Support for devices with Persistent-memory
- Encrypted storage for the ext4 file system.
- Adoption of the Berkeley packet filter (BPF) engine within the kernel for extensibility of the security module (security-module).
- Numerous networking improvements focused on IPv6 and datacenter improvements.
Linux developers have turned their attention to improving Linux security. Support has been added for many hardware-based security features. These include Intel's memory protection extensions and memory protection keys, and privileged non-execution mechanisms for ARM.
The kernel itself has been hardened to prevent attackers from taking over the system even when a security vulnerability exists. This is largely due to the integration of work from the long-running grsecurity project.
Looking at the bigger picture, how Linux can become a model, not just for the development of open source software, but for the development of all software, Zemling suggests a moral lesson from the Linux story: “You can make yourself better when you make others better at the same time.”
“Sharing is hard work,” Zemlin added, “but it’s good work in every sense of the word.”.
He continued, “By sharing, you make yourself and others better, and that is a higher purpose, something that matters. That is the magic of Linux and open source, and that is what the Linux movement has achieved for over 25 years.”
“Today,” he added, “Linux is not imitating the past, it is here to define the future.”
Ainissa G. Ramirez , who took the stage after Zemlin, elaborated on how technology can shape humanity.
“Technology today is faster and more innovative than ever. If you don't believe it, just think about all the people who have different lives today with Pokémon Go, which didn't exist four weeks ago.”
Ramirez pointed out that we don't know what changes technology will bring. For example, the modern helmet for American football led to an increase in concussions. Why? Because players started playing with their heads. Yes, a safety measure actually ended up making the game more dangerous.
So for the developers who will be working on the next 25 years of Linux, Ramirez encourages them to realize that their work can have a much bigger impact on the world than they realize. Therefore, they should develop the technology they aspire to create a better world. She concluded, “I know what I’m asking may not be easy, but changing the world never was.”
