Stormy Peters, GNOME Foundation: Red Hat Leads Corporate Contributions to GNOME Desktop Project

August 4, 2010

In a census study published by Neary Consulting at GUADEC, held last week in The Hague, Netherlands, Red Hat placed first among the total 106 companies that have contributed to GNOME development over the past 10 years with nearly 17 percent of the total code commits. The study also showed that nine out of the top 20 contributors are Red Hat employees.

The GNOME project, governed by the GNOME Foundation, was founded over 13 years ago with the goal of creating a free software desktop user environment for UNIX-type operating systems. Today, the project constitutes a large body of source code that is used by the free, Red Hat-sponsored Fedora distribution and the commercially supplied Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as other Linux distributions and platforms. Red Hat serves as a member of the GNOME advisory board, in addition to Canonical, Collabora, Debian, Free Software Foundation, Google, IBM, Igalia, Intel, Motorola, Mozilla Foundation, Nokia, Novell, OLPC, Oracle and the Software Freedom Law Center.

"As the leading open source software provider, we take pride in contributing our skills and the desktop technologies that we develop to the GNOME community. Red Hat thrives on driving innovation across broad ranges of leading-edge technology including desktop, kernel, virtualization and development tools. This breadth of innovation uniquely positions Red Hat to deliver comprehensive product solutions," said Tim Burke, vice president, Platform Engineering at Red Hat. "Earlier this year Red Hat also open sourced the SPICE VDI/HVD communication protocol, which is now available for our customers and the community. We're very pleased to be recognized by the GNOME Census as the leading contributor to the project, as we see true value in the collaborative development of an open alternative to proprietary client operating systems."

"The GNOME Foundation is glad to see the GNOME Census report, which highlights all of the individuals and companies that have contributed code to GNOME," said Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation. "GNOME has many individual and corporate contributors that help the project thrive. We're fortunate to have committed partners like Red Hat that have taken an active role in leading the development of free software desktop technologies."

"As long-time partners, IBM and Red Hat have worked together to help drive forward Linux desktop technology," said Bob Sutor, vice president, Open Source and Linux at IBM. "By combining GNOME Linux desktops with the IBM Client for Smart Work, organizations benefit from an open productivity platform that can replace many proprietary desktop environments at a significantly lower cost."