Nokia Biggest Contributor to Android Codebase After Google, Individuals

Earlier this year, Nokia, the biggest phone manufacturer in the world decided to join forces with Microsoft to create their next lineup of smartphones. The decision surprised many as people thought that Nokia would play it safe and develop phones using both Windows Phone 7 and .

Android Contributors

In the process, Nokia made their flagship OS a secondary in the company and Android as a competitor. However, this news might come as a big surprise to many people.

According to research done by Libre Software Research (via Carlodaffara), Nokia is the biggest contributor to Android source code after Google and some other independent committers. In fact Nokia has more commits in the codebase than Motorola, and Intel.

Having a look at the name of the domains, it is very surprising that Nokia is one of the most active contributors. This is a real paradox, the company that states that Android is its main competition helps it!. One of the effects of using libre software licenses for your work is that even your competition can use your code, currently there are Nokia commits in the following repositories:

  • git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/external/dbus
  • git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/external/bluetooth/bluez

The research shows that 90% of the commits to Android codebase was done by Google employees using email addresses ending with google.com or android.com, while users with a nokia.com email address had more than 762 commits.

Apparently Nokia was the one who funded the dbus; a message bus system for applications to talk to each other and bluez; the official Bluetooth protocol stack for Linux which were later on taken up by Google for Android.

This is definitely an irony that Nokia contributes so much to a system it calls it’s competition. However, that is how the Open Source community works, no bias, just code.

Note: The research conducted by Libre Software took 171 GIT repositories into consideration and did not include the Linux Kernel in it’s analysis.

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Keith Dsouza

I am the editor-in-chief and owner of Techie Buzz. I love coding and have contributed to several open source projects in the past. You can know more about me and my projects by visiting my Personal Website.I am also a social networking enthusiast and can be found active on twitter, you can follow Keith on twitter @keithdsouza. You can click on my name to visit my Google+ profile.

  • http://keryx.se/ Lars Gunther

    Not surprising for anyone who knows what Nokia has been doing. Maemo/Meego shares the Linux kernel with Android and relies heavily on dbus.

  • http://www.indt.org.br Thales

    Just a heads up. Openbossa.org is a domain used by the free software group part of Nokia Institute of Technology (INdT), a R&D institute created by Nokia in Brazil. So the total count for Nokia is 762 + 298.

  • akshar dave

    nokia…again trying something new.

  • dans

    Where’s is the confusion, Nokia has always been big into open source and Linux.

  • Ademar

    BTW, openbossa.org (298 commits in the chart) is from the Nokia Institute of Technology in Brazil, a research institute sponsored by Nokia itself. The openbossa webside is down, but the institute website is http://www.indt.org.br

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  • Marlon Luz

    openbossa.org is also Nokia