It’s always the quiet ones isn’t it?

In a muted show of publicity from a quiet corner of the open source development community, comes news this week that security appliance vendor Astaro Corporation has been recognised as the ninth most active employer for changesets produced in the new Linux 2.6.25 release.

Not just flag waving I think, according to research published by the Linux Foundation itself, developer Patrick McHardy has been ranked as the second most active developer by changesets and twelfth by the total number of changed lines.

The Linux Foundation says that the Linux kernel is one of the largest and fastest moving open source projects that there is - and that it is unsurprisingly one of the largest individual components on almost any Linux system. The project has an exceptionally large contributor base and also boasts corporate involvement.

According to the Astaro, the company has made “considerable” contributions to the Linux kernel project in the form of code, developer sponsorships and financial support since inception in 2000.

As of April 2, 2008, a total of 12,269 changesets had been merged for the Linux 2.6.25 release, a new record that beats the previous record by almost 2,000. McHardy, under Astaro’s sponsorship, has contributed to 1.8% of these changesets.