At GUADEC last week Neary Consulting revealed the results of its GNOME Census, a report that studied who contributes to the GNOME project. The study found that some 70 percent of contributors are unpaid, but that the majority of commits comes from paid participants. The vast majority (70 percent) of contributors work on the project on their spare time, while an additional 20 percent of contributors do so on both a paid and voluntary basis.

The Study also looked at commercial developers' contributions to GNOME. In the information collected, Red Hat had the highest percentage of contributions to the project with 16.3 percent. Immediately behind Red Hat was Novell with 10.44 percent. The top five commercial contributors were rounded out with Collabora (4.99 percent), Intel (2.57 percent), and Fluendo (2.35 percent).

The study was quick to point out that Red Hat's ranking isn't much of a surprise, considering the company employs 16 of the top 40 GNOME contributors. Red Hat has been key in developing middleware modules such as device detection and sound support to the project.

The report also cautions about the compartmental nature of GNOME development. According to the report, specific companies have carved out areas of GNOME to maintain.

From the report: "This compares unfavorable with the Linux kernel, where there are several active maintainers for each subsystem."