Open source giant Red Hat, which announced annual revenues of $1bn late last month, has been upping its contributions to the cloud platform OpenStack, according to statistics published last week. An analysis of Git activity cited by open source news site The H places Red Hat as the third most frequent corporate contributor to OpenStack’s latest release, bested only by founders Red Hat and Nebula, despite not being an official member of the project.

According to tech blog GigaOm, both Red Hat and IBM are set to announce membership during next week’s OpenStack Spring Conference in San Francisco. But unlike Red Hat, IBM doesn’t figure at all on the list of regular contributors.

The top 10 corporate contributors with numbers of lines changed, generated through email address scraping by the “Git Data Miner” program, is reproduced below:

Rackspace                 239195 (46.8%)
Nebula                    124821 (24.4%)
Red Hat                   27591 (5.4%)
Citrix                    20403 (4.0%)
Midokura                  17331 (3.4%)
HP                        13020 (2.5%)
Nicira                    8721 (1.7%)
hudayou@hotmail.com       6359 (1.2%)
Cisco Systems             6324 (1.2%)
Delta Electronics         3497 (0.7%)

Delta is followed closely by Ubuntu creator Canonical, which has racked up 3,267 line changes in the latest release. Codenamed Essex, this is the fifth major iteration of OpenStack -- according to the website, it “focuses on quality, usability and extensibility across enterprise, service provider and high performance computing (HPC) deployments.”

Backed by NASA, OpenStack aims to provide a flexible and reliable open source cloud platform, allowing any provider to easily create their own Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) product. The project saw its first major release in October 2010, with its Python-centric codebase having evolved significantly since.

(via The H)