Jonathan Roberts wrote:
I think the more important battle is for the public understanding of where upstream development stems from and being better at taking credit for the excellent work Fedora does.+1 which is exactly what I think the mission of the marketing team should be. Fedora drives a lot of innovation and due to its strong belief in working closely with upstream a lot of the innovation quickly becomes available to other distributions. Something the article overlooked I think: while open source code can benefit everyone, the ease with which this happens is influenced by how quickly code gets upstream and I'm not convinced Ubuntu, or any distribution, is as good at this as Fedora. Anybody got any ideas where we could get some numbers on this!?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions and in the references. People have done various studies on which vendors contribute how much to the Linux kernel in particular and Red Hat in usually by a large margin the leading contributor. That would probably be the same for GTK and GNOME though I don't know of anyone doing any formal analysis. Then there are other key pieces like Glibc, GCC and on more desktop neutral stuff like HAL, DBus, Cairo, NetworkManager etc.
From the volunteer community, there are a good number of people who contribute to various upstream projects. A few examples,
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BryanSullivan (Mercurial upstream. Refer http://lwn.net/Articles/153990/ for a interesting detail).
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/HansdeGoede http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KevinKofler I am pretty sure there are several dozen more contributors such as these. Rahul