academia contribution to the kernel

Mon May 30 19:05:28 EDT 2011

Hello,

A few days ago Greg k-h posted in his blog asking to send questions
that he could make in his interview with Linus at LinuxCon Japan.
Sadly his keynote is tomorrow so I'm a bit late to send him a question
I would like to ask Linus, key kernel developers and companies
sponsoring Linux development. Instead I will make the question in this
list to know what you people think about.

My question is: why academia contribution to the Linux kernel is negligible?

In the last linux foundation report about who is sponsoring the Linux
kernel development, academia contribution was less than 1.5%.

Being involved in the academia as a PhD student I have my own
conclusions that are very similar to the ones exposed by Thomas
Gleixner in his lwn.net article "academia v. reality"
(http://lwn.net/Articles/397422/).

How can the Linux foundation and companies behind Linux improve this?
Academia has too much resources (both human and financial) that can be
used to improve Linux.

LTTng and Linux Checkpoint/Restart (linux-cr) are two examples that
academia can produce features to enhance the kernel.

Best regards,

-- 
Javier Martínez Canillas
(+34) 682 39 81 69
PhD Student in High Performance Computing
Computer Architecture and Operating System Department (CAOS)
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain