The Linux Foundation has released their 2023 Annual Report… and it is an absolute doozy.
The first big headline?
As of 2023, The Linux Foundation now spends just 2% – that’s two percent – of their revenue on their namesake: The Linux Kernel.
Talk about an author with an agenda. He cherry picks data points to stir the shit. The figure he could have included in his blog post but didn’t:
Why does the kernel need more money spent on it? It seems pretty stable and feature complete to me.
Spending money on the rest of the ecosystem seems pretty reasonable to me. CNCF for example, is fantastic.
Yeah, the CNCF is super important in the server space, they’re pretty much the only major organization making open source server technology.
I think building the Linux ecosystem is just as important as developing Linux itself. If Debian is important for desktop Linux, then CNCF is just as important for Linux servers and containers.
This story is stupid.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/
Right there on their front page it’s stated that they participate in 900 open source projects.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects
On the project page you can see the projects by 20 categories, and see what they are doing in any category that may interest you.
Also Linux Foundation doesn’t collect money from people unknowing of what it’s for. The money is contributed by 17000 companies/organisations, that have hired professionals to put their money and developments where it matters to them. They know perfectly well how the money is spent.
The Linux Foundation is a 509(a)(3) support organization.
In other words, they provide legal and financial infrastructure to smaller open source projects that aren’t big enough to justify their own foundation.
What’s the doozy? To keep Linux alive you have to keep the open source culture alive. With over a thousand projects that are needed to make the kernel useful as anything other than a technical experiment. Just another author who is either too stupid to understand how anything works, or was paid to promote an anti FOSS agenda.
