Influence in the Linux Kernel community

Abstract

Several success stories of open source (OS) products have been seen during last decade. Due to the economical importance of the products, it is important to know who are the ones who have the largest influence to the products. Is there a dominant player in developing communities? In this paper 1 the aspect is studied with respect to the Linux Kernel community. We show that the influence is centered to a small number of core people, and corporates have a large impact to the development. Moreover, we enumerate the most influential companies. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.