At GUADEC, Dave Neary presented the results of the GNOME Census. The results reveal some very interesting findings. Around 70% of the developers identify themselves as volunteer and 70% of the commits made in the GNOME releases are made by paid developers.

Now, here is the part that has started out something like a war – Canonical’s contribution to GNOME is only a mere 1%, while Red Hat contributes 16%.

[Note: Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu and Red Hat is behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora.]

Yes many are bashing Canonical for this. Some are claiming that Canonical has been taking credit for the hard-works by Red Hat engineers.

It is not that Canonical is not doing anything. They are doing a lot of things in the desktop in fact – the thing is they are not getting upstream to GNOME. I do not know whose fault it is – if Canonical is not pushing their codes upstream to GNOME or if GNOME does not like what Canonical is doing and are rejecting them. Either way, the numbers are clear – Red Hat contributes 16 times as much as Canonical does to GNOME.

But no, we are not going to join the Canonical bashing. Comparing Red Hat to Canonical is not fair in my opinion. Red Hat has a revenue of around $700 millions; Canonical is just around $30 millions and they are yet to break even. And if you compare the employees – Red Hat has 2500 while Canonical has around 350. And most important of all, Red Hat is 17 years old and has a much bigger say in the directions that GNOME takes compared to Canonical which is only 6 years old. See, it is pointless to compare them.

So yes it is indeed sad to see Red Hat supporters and Canonical supporters attacking each other over some number.