Corporate Involvement of Libre Software: Study of Presence in Debian Code over Time

Although much of the research on the libre (free, open source) phenomenon has been focused on the involvement of volunteers, the role of companies is also important in many projects. In fact, during the last years, the involvement of companies in the libre software world seems to be raising. In this paper we present an study that shows, quantitatively, how important this involvement is in the production of the largest collection of code available for Linux: the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. By studying copyright attributions in source code, we have identified those companies with more attributed code, and the trend of corporate presence in Debian from 1998 to 2004.