OStatic

Andy Patrizio, over at InternetNews.com, is trotting out that tired old question once again: where are the open source billionaires? as if that was somehow relevant or necessary for open source to be worthwhile. Patrizio also suggests that open source is being carried by large vendors, but doesn't seem to grasp the benefits that the vendors are getting out of open source.

In case you were wondering, Red Hat--fresh off a rosy earnings report that was interpreted by analysts as a welcoming present for new CEO Jim Whitehurst--won't deliver a desktop product for consumers anytime soon. In a news post at the company's site, team members write: We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

While there has been much speculation that Red Hat might target the consumer desktop, I'm not surprised by this news. Why isn't the company delivering such a product? Because it doesn't need to.

Recently, I was talking to a tech journalist friend of mine who has been covering Microsoft since the company's inception. He made the point that nobody at Microsoft knows the whole code base of the Windows operating system anymore. Individuals once did, but the operating system is a big ball of code that no single developer knows from end to end.

That was the thought that came to mind when I saw the just-released survey on Linux Kernel Development from the Linux Foundation. The survey provides an exhaustive and fascinating glimpse at what it describes as one of the largest cooperative software projects ever attempted.