Lots of companies, even Microsoft, contribute to the Linux kernel. When you look at the top 20 list of who’s been contributing to Linux’s heart, you’ll find many familiar Linux names such as Novell (now SUSE), Red Hat, and The Linux Foundation. Who you won’t find is Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company. Some people wonder how Microsoft could do more for Linux than Canonical does. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, has a response to such claims: “Our focus is on the user experience, making things ‘Just Work.’”
In an e-mail, Shuttleworth explained to me that, “Stabilizing and maintaining the kernel is very important to Ubuntu. We have 25 or more kernel engineers at Canonical, focused on device enablement from ARM through to Xeon, and QA [Quality Assurance]. Our focus is on the user experience, making things ‘Just Work,’ and quality. The kernel team plays an important role in making Ubuntu so easy to use on everybody’s laptops, servers and clouds, and they maintain arguably the most widely used kernels in Ubuntu releases.”
Specifically, “Our teams have lead the ARM tree unification effort in Linaro, and we lead Linux kernel efforts among the vendors that ship devices with Ubuntu. We also maintain AppArmor, which is a security framework that takes the rigor of SELinux [Security Enhanced Linux] and makes it easy to use.”