I am spent some time at LinuxCon Europe a few weeks back, and thought that this might be a nice time to revisit a little analysis I had previously run – does the number of commits to the Linux kernel from a company have any correlation to a firms valuation on the stock market.
Do keep in mind that this is just a bit of fun – there are so many more aspects to a company’s success over and above contribution to a specific technology, but its fun to look at nonetheless, and in the case of the eleven companies we looked at Linux is just one of a range of technologies and activities they are involved with, and has varying degrees of strategic importance.
What is interesting to note is the sheer scale of contributions from RedHat (unsurprisingly), Intel, IBM, Oracle and Google.
As for our question – there is a small correlation, but it is very weak. Spearmans rho comes out as 0.36 on this data.
Acknowledgements: the data on kernel commits is extracted from kps data set maintained by Wang Che. Most of the heavy lifting was already done.
Disclosure: IBM, HP, Red Hat, Oracle, Cisco and EMC are current RedMonk clients.
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