If I'm recalling my numbers right Canonical has about 500 developers the last
time I checked. That is up from 80 a few years ago. It is difficult to
compete with that kind of pool. I might be wrong about the 500 developer
count. They have at least that many employees and if it is anything like it
was a few years ago I believe they are mostly developers so it might not be
far off even if I'm wrong.
I don't know of any other distribution with so many developers. Novell and
Redhat are probably competing although it seems like they really have
targeted a different market from the feel of the distribution. In fact Redhat
has explicitly stated that much and I'm pretty confident in saying Novell
remains a 'network' company or at least never really got into the desktop. I
think when SUSE was a German operation back in early 2000's they were more
desktop oriented.
Redhat has 3,200 employees according to wikipedia. I don't know how many are
developers. Redhat hasn't focused on the desktop like Canonical for 15 -18
years. Compare that to Canonical which was prior to 11.04. They still are
much more focused on consumer devices than Redhat.
Novell says they employee 3,600 people. Again I don't know the developer
count. I believe Novell is a dying company though.
The good news about Novell and Canonical dying is Redhat isn't going anywhere
and they contribute significantly to the desktop. Possibly more than
Canonical. That is at least in terms of code. For whatever reason they just
don't put out a polished desktop distribution like Trisquel, Canonical, and
Linux Mint. I don't mean to exclude other distributions. I'm just naming
those which are free and/or at the top in numbers of users.
Ideally what I would like to see is a developer pool independent of hand
outs. There is no reason you can't make money on free software. Our own
success shows that its feasible. I don't believe we are the only ones to have
a successful business model around desktop GNU/Linux. There was one other
distribution which I'll say was successful in terms of having had brought in
sufficient dollars to stay afloat and even prosper. I won't mention the
company due to the particular distaste this community had for it at the time.
They did a lot of things wrong although I think much of it was blown out of
proportion. As much as they spent on PR the top executives ruined it. They
didn't get it even though the company was largely going in the right
direction. The part they didn't get was you can't go saying things which
anger the larger community no matter how right you think you are. Had the
main shareholder not screwed things up financially for the company they would
probably be a free distribution today (or close to it-they did exit with a
mostly free distribution- at least to the extent Ubuntu is free- which it
isn't- but it is based largely free software-Unity for instance, etc vs
non-free stuff SUSE produced in the day or Xandros). That is a pretty big
step for a company that was cautious and essentially started out as a
business based on non-free software. They never did completely exit the
non-free business although I bet they could have given enough time.
Everything developed in house was free'd by the end.
