The "Big Three" Linux companies ranked by Revenue, Employees, Kernel Contributions
Red Hat, SUSE, & Canonical. Because stats and charts are fun.
If somebody asks you, “What is the biggest Linux company?”… You probably know the answer. Red Hat.
But how big is Red Hat? How does it compare to other Linux companies? And how does that size translate into contributions to Linux, itself?
What follows are some key statistics of what I call “The Big Three” Linux companies:
Red Hat (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora)
SUSE (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server)
Canonical (Ubuntu)
Using fancy-shmancy graphs. Because sometimes it’s nice to be able to visualize this sort of thing.
Let’s start with revenue (aka “How much money they brought in”).
A few quick takeaways:
WOW. Red Hat annual revenues are roughly 10 times that of SUSE. And over 32 times that of Canonical.
Annual revenue for all three companies increased significantly between 2020 and 2021.
Note: The Red Hat revenue does not include revenue from its parent company (IBM). Likewise SUSE revenue doe not include revenue related to its primary owner (EQT).
Now. Let’s look at the total number of employees at each company.
All three companies are sizable, in terms of staff. Roughly the same ratio as with revenue (which you would expect).
Red Hat has close to 8 times the manpower as SUSE. And over 31 times Canonical.
But how does that manpower translate into work getting done on upstream projects? Let’s look at the most obvious project… one that they all have a significant interest in… the Linux Kernel itself.
It’s worth noting that all three companies have their own open source projects they develop — and, to varying degrees, they also contribute other upstream projects. But Linux… they all need Linux.
Note the question marks there for Canonical. The reality is… Canonical did not contribute a significant, measurable number of changes to either of the last two major Linux Kernel versions.
Is it possible that the Canonical percentage could be as high as 0.1 or 0.2%? Maybe. Regardless, the number is incredibly small. Which is pretty consistent for Canonical. You certainly won’t find Canonical on any “Top 10” lists of Kernel Contributors. Or top 20 lists… or top… you get the idea.
The other big takeaway… is how impressive the Linux Kernel contributions are from SUSE.
SUSE has roughly 1/8th the total number of employees as Red Hat… yet manages to pull off roughly 1/2 the number of Linux Kernel changesets.
That’s darned impressive.
Regardless. Both are contributing more to the Linux Kernel… than Canonical.
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