Red Hat is the top corporate contributor to the GNOME project, according to the Neary Consulting survey.

In a census study published by Neary Consulting at GUADEC, held last week in The Hague, Netherlands, Red Hat placed first among the total 106 companies that have contributed to GNOME development over the past 10 years with nearly 17 percent of the total code commits. The study also showed that nine out of the top 20 contributors are Red Hat employees.

Second, as they did in the similar study of the Linux kernel (Kernel09), Red Hat tops the table among commercial developers of GNOME. Given that they are the current or past employer of 16 of the top 40 individual GNOME contributors, this is unsurprising. Novell and Collabora complete the top three. Canonical also made it to the list.

Consultancy and services companies specialising in the GNOME platform figure well. Collabora, Lanedo, Openismus and Codethink all figure in the top 20 companies. These companies have grown 16 around an expertise in specific modules – Collabora, for example, is a key maintainer of gstreamer and Telepathy, and related projects.

The GNOME project, governed by the GNOME Foundation, was founded over 13 years ago with the goal of creating a free software desktop user environment for UNIX-type operating systems. Today, the project constitutes a large body of source code that is used by the free, Red Hat-sponsored Fedora distribution and the commercially supplied Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as other Linux distributions and platforms. Red Hat serves as a member of the GNOME advisory board, in addition to Canonical, Collabora, Debian, Free Software Foundation, Google, IBM, Igalia, Intel, Motorola, Mozilla Foundation, Nokia, Novell, OLPC, Oracle and the Software Freedom Law Center.

“The GNOME Foundation is glad to see the GNOME Census report, which highlights all of the individuals and companies that have contributed code to GNOME,” said Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation. “GNOME has many individual and corporate contributors that help the project thrive. We're fortunate to have committed partners like Red Hat that have taken an active role in leading the development of free software desktop technologies."