Isn't the majority of work on the Linux kernel done by big companies like Red
Hat, SuSe, and IBM? I know that there are people in the community that work
on it, but the majority of updates to the kernel come from these companies
that pay their workers to work on it. Heck, even Microsoft contributes:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/top-five-linux-contributor-microsoft/9254
If these three companies chose to stop paying their employees to work on the
kernel, will the quality go down? People get motivated by money and if they
can get paid to do what they love as their main job to pay the bills instead
of doing it in their free time, I believe more attention is put into the work
with better organization and a stricter schedule.
I mean... people freaked out with the news of Kubuntu's main maintainer no
longer getting paid by Canonical after the 12.04 release. He even addressed
his concerns as well. There was a big panic about the quality of future
releases due to him no longer being compensated. Of course the Kubuntu
community will take over and it will be interesting to see if the quality
matches the ones where he was employed.
