On why companies hire kernel developers:
“We’re finding out more and more there’s actually a commercial imperative to give your software away to help others, because they help you and then everyone benefits… This is the way to do business.” – Dave Chinner, Red Hat.
“As Facebook has demonstrated with their Open Compute platform initiative, it actually makes economic sense to develop this in the open and not just improve your own data center but also improve data centers elsewhere… I view this as pretty much the same thing, just on the software side.” – Jens Axboe, Facebook.