Corporate Involvement in the Linux Kernel
05/13/25 • 46 min
Open source investment and involvement are still considered risky and expensive, even though there are individuals, companies and studies that say the opposite. What's your take on this?
In this My Open Source Experience podcast episode Ildiko and Phil explore corporate involvement in the Linux kernel community with Greg Kroah-Hartman. Greg has been a long-term Linux kernel contributor and maintainer, being responsible for the stable branches. Greg had both personal interest in getting involved, as well as motivation from the company he worked for at the time. The Linux kernel has been a popular choice to build an operating system, and therefore corporate investment has been strong in the project with 80% - 85% of the contributors being involved in the community as part of their paid job.
Learn more about:
What individuals get out of working upstream
Common mistakes and misconceptions companies have about involvement in open source projects
Cultural challenges and examples to resolve them
What successful companies did to thrive with OSS
How to be proactive to sync product and open source project deliveries
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Open source investment and involvement are still considered risky and expensive, even though there are individuals, companies and studies that say the opposite. What's your take on this?
In this My Open Source Experience podcast episode Ildiko and Phil explore corporate involvement in the Linux kernel community with Greg Kroah-Hartman. Greg has been a long-term Linux kernel contributor and maintainer, being responsible for the stable branches. Greg had both personal interest in getting involved, as well as motivation from the company he worked for at the time. The Linux kernel has been a popular choice to build an operating system, and therefore corporate investment has been strong in the project with 80% - 85% of the contributors being involved in the community as part of their paid job.
Learn more about:
What individuals get out of working upstream
Common mistakes and misconceptions companies have about involvement in open source projects
Cultural challenges and examples to resolve them
What successful companies did to thrive with OSS
How to be proactive to sync product and open source project deliveries
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Previous Episode
Increase Cross-Team Efficiency with InnerSource
We often talk about collaboration in the context of open source, or at least externally to a company with partner organizations. However, especially in larger corporations, cross-team work is just as important as the teamwork itself. Working with other teams is often more complicated than it needs to be, for various reasons. These teams could be in different countries, or the company's structure might not allow them to work together efficiently. What can you do to fix that?
In this episode of the My Open Source Experience podcast Tom Sadler talks about how he explored open source and InnerSource, and how he became an upstream contributor through the latter. Tom also shares how InnerSource helped teams within BBC to work together more efficiently, and how it allowed the company to work upstream as well.
Learn more about:
Why and how to roll out InnerSource within a company
Metrics to measure team efficiency
Do you need an ISPO/OSPO?
What you need to know to consume open source safely and efficiently
Why you need to avoid having internal forks of open source projects
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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