Astaro ranked top Linux contributor

BURLINGTON, USA: Astaro Corp., a leading vendor of integrated security appliances, recently announced that the company has been recognized as the ninth most active employer for changesets produced in the new Linux 2.6.25 release, according to recent research published by the Linux Foundation.

Developer Patrick McHardy has been ranked as the 2nd most active developer by changesets and 12th by the total number of changed lines. He is currently the Chairman of the netfilter (a Linux kernal subsystem) core team, which Astaro has sponsored since 2002, along with several other open source projects.

According to the Linux Foundation: "The Linux kernel is one of the largest and most successful open source projects that has ever come about." As one of the largest individual components on almost any Linux system, the project is unique in its large contributor base, corporate involvement and the way that direct competitors collaborate to progress the Linux kernel.

The development process is also one of the fastest-moving, and involves more developers than any other open source project. Astaro 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 percent of these changesets.

In addition to Astaro's sponsorship, McHardy, who works in the networking area of the project, mostly with the netfilter subsystem, is also constantly employed as a freelancer for Astaro, working closely with the company headquarters to help with debugging, new features, questions and development of the open source components of the Astaro product line.

In addition to sponsoring the development of the Linux kernel and netfilter project, Astaro has also contributed monetarily to the following open source projects: Clam AntiVirus, StrongSwan, OpenVPN, Exim, and OpenSSL.