30 July 2010, 14:45

GNOME Census: Who writes GNOME?

Nearly Consulting, which specialises in community relations and free software strategy, has published the results of its GNOME Census. According to Nearly Consulting founder Dave Neary, the census report analyses how developers participate in the GNOME project and looks for patterns within the project itself.

The report found that more than 70% of developers identified themselves as volunteers, working on GNOME in their spare time. Red Hat is said to be the biggest contributor to the project and its core dependencies, with its employees being responsible for nearly 17% of all commits measured by the study. A number of other organisations, including Novell (10%), British open source specialist Collabora Ltd. (nearly 5%), Intel (2.5%) and Fluendo, also make substantial contributions to the desktop project. The top two individual committers are Red Hat employees Matthias Clasen and Richard Hughes with 1.8% and 1.7% respectively.

The full report, titled "The GNOME Census: Who writes GNOME?" PDF , is available from the Nearly Consulting website as a free download. The GNOME Census is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.