Reading through the list of projects that the Linux Foundation supports (via infrastructure, governance, events, etc) with the other 181 million is honestly shocking. They are supporting, among like a thousand others - NodeJS/OpenJS, PyTorch, Electron, K8s, vLLM, ONNX, PX4, GraphQL - plus the 'smaller' entries like Zephyr, Containerd, gRPC, KiCAD, ESLint, Fastify, etc. Their portfolio is literally insane. This is the BlackRock of the entire digital world.
Lets see; a phone os no one used, and ad on installed without user permision as a tie-for a TV show, browser integration with a thirdparty bookmarking service that should have been an optional addon, a VPN, an abborted browser based video confercing service based on open standards that they killed for non obvious reasons, a bunch of social justice initiatives, an email masking/forwarding service killing their addon APIs in favor of googles more limited api.
To be fair to the vpn product, at least they did it through a partnership with mullvad, one of the least-terrible (not even in the same ballpark as the likes of nordvpn, etc) commercial vpn service providers in existence.
Without bending over backwards to defend the Linux Foundation, I'll point out that the 97% number means very little -- the percentage that actually matters is the percentage that doesn't go towards funding open source at all. The Linux Foundation hasn't been solely about Linux for decades; they are (facially) responsible for hosting a very large number of open source projects.
And one would argue without actually focusing on Linux the kernel and Linux distro on top for the average user, they're just funding server FOSS for use by fat companies
That’s explicitly their mission, though! They’re a trade organization that advances member interests, not a public interest nonprofit.
(In effect, they’re a coordinating body for fat companies. They do indeed fund things in those companies’ interests, but they do it with corporate money.)
>They’re a trade organization that advances member interests, not a public interest nonprofit.
Maybe they should say that with a huge banner on their website then. How many people give them money thinking it's for the good of FOSS in the idealistic sense?
Very few, I think. I had to search for their “donate” page, and it says explicitly that donations are not tax deductible.
(FWICT, the overwhelming majority of LF’s money comes from conference fees, and the biggest chunk of the rest comes from corporate dues. Private donations don’t appear to be a significant portion of their income.)
Lots of opensource project use the Linux Foundation to handle their funding. My understanding is that e.g. corporate sponsors for the KiCad project will actually transfer the money to the Linux Foundation but the money is then earmarked for the KiCad project. The advantage for KiCad is then that they don't have the overhead (accounting, receipts, etc.).
Pedantically, they're wrong, but the two are closely related.
They both use the parent's hash together with the contents of the block/changes in the commit to compute hash of the current block/commit.
Git supports many parallel branches, while Blockchain uses decentralized consensus mechanisms to keep the entire network in agreement and resolve branches as soon as possible. So yes, the mathematical problems in the two are different, but the data structure is very similar.
Source: my last job was creating developer toolsuits for Blockchain.
Y'all love to pretend blockchain is important and useful for all kinds of things. Just stop. It's shady to try to take credit for anything good in the hope that some of the goodwill rubs off on blockchain.
Git predates Bitcoin. It is also useful and efficient, things blockchain is not.
You cannot claim everything that uses hashes is a fucking blockchain, it's ridiculous.
2% on the Linux kernel. 1% on open hardware. 4% on blockchain.
I think that says it.
They do support many other projects and seem to be stewards of the Linux ecosystem in general, but... 4% on blockchain?! I also feel many other projects should have their own funding: they're key to many businesses and that the 'Linux' foundation sponsors them is (a) good but (b) misplaced in the overall messed up system that is open source reliance and sponsorship.
I've had occasional concerns about the Linux Foundation and how it operates, but there's no question it has been a transformative contribution to Open Source.
A bunch of folks decided to get off their butts and gather donations to support Linux... and then it snowballed. Cool. The creators and members get to decide how they contribute, and projects get to decide if they want to participate. There are alternatives for projects that need to "raise and spend", and some are 501(c)(3).
(Also keep in mind that techrights.org has been an unhinged shit sheet attacking individuals and companies for insufficient purity for decades now.)
> Linus Torvalds is not in charge and is no longer compensated fairly, either. The highest paid people don't even use Linux. Torvalds is no longer in the top 10 (not anymore).
And then link to a filing that shows his “compensation” being lower than the others but also having an extra million dollars in the “other” column.
Actually crazy that Linus just takes home 1.5M per year for one of the largest contributions to tech of anyone in the world. Obviously nobody needs more than that per year, but this pay is 1/100 or 1/1000th of many tech executives that have contributed very little comparatively.
A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers who worry about incentives and technological progress, this here is a perfect (and not the only) example of how intrinsic motivation can beat extrinsic motivation by a huge margin.
There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people. Such people are also less likely to cause damage to others because it's very rare that damage to others fulfills one's intrinsic needs. Linus is arguably a net positive to human society than the top 20 billionaires combined. We need more of him and less of the others.
> A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers
Perhaps the "billionaire sympathizers" are people who can manage to see that the bar for what is considered an unacceptable amount of wealth will keep being revised lower and lower until it affects them. Here you are already proposing that a person shouldn't be allowed to earn more than a total of a million dollars in income every year, which caps one's lifetime wealth accumulation at $40-60M[0]. Which would make anyone able to achieve anywhere close to that sum as wealthy as today's wealthiest persons. After which the next person will suggest that such a thing shouldn't be allowed for the betterment of society.
0: assuming you can start earning that much starting at age 20 and you intend on retiring between 60 to 80, so obviously the range can go up or down a bit.
>There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people.
Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true. The vast majority of successful companies and products are developed by people motivated by money, and if you try to prevent them from being rewarded for their hard work then they just go somewhere where their effort is more welcome.
It's always wild to me how people perceive Europe. In left-wing academia there is this term "neoliberal encasement" that discusses in detail how neoliberal capitalism isolates the economy from democracy. The EU is sort of the end stage of this idea, economic policy is detached from democratic comtrol to such a degree that member states submit their draft budgets to unelected technocrats in Brussels for approval before "voting" on it. Imagine if IMF economists were to run the economies of a continent, that's what the EU is. It's staggering how completely the opposite of valuing people's intrinsic incentives this model is, but I get where you are coming from of course everybody thinks that, it's just still wild to me how they managed that narrative so well.
Really? Your rhetoric seems to miss a LOT of new global businesses, as well as older ones that are much bigger than ever before.
Spotify, Wise, Adyen, DeepMind just off the top of my head, but there are loads more.
The fact that you don’t know about them is because many tech bros in the USA are pretty parochial and haven’t been exposed to international businesses or indeed tech.
> Obviously nobody needs more than that per year ...
You are, of course, in a position to know what everybody on Earth needs.
What if someone wants to give $10 million away per year to worthy charities? Will you tell them they can't?
Or... what if someone wants to own something you consider wastefully expensive? Is it your job to tell them they shouldn't? Or is it wiser to adopt the position of humility and say "Well, it's their business, not mine, what they spend their money on"?
It's easy to be motivated by envy, even when we think we aren't. It's much better for your soul, and your peace of mind, to adopt the "let them" mentality, and not decide what other people, whose lives you know nothing about, need.
There is a big difference between 'needs' and 'wants'.
I'll defend the argument no one 'needs' more than 1.5 mill per year.
I agree with you greed is endless and lots of people want more and will rationalize their hoarding while others, often in their own communities, suffer.
No one really "needs" anything. You can live perfectly well on minimum wage. But really, you could survive perfectly well as a slave. Infact, the world is content for you to die and get nothing. All "need" is "want". All you deserve is what you have leverage for.
This comment feels like playing stupid to such an absurd degree that the argument loses any semblance of thought and you sound like you're yelling at clouds.
Obviously being a slave is not the same as being a millionaire. If you make your argument this reductionist then you don't even sound human anymore, let alone well reasoned.
Let's end this conversation right here before it descends any further into ideological battle. And in the interests of peace, I shall hold my tongue about what I think about Marx, or of you for recommending him in a positive light.
Ah, something I can respond to without engaging in ideological battle. Instead, let's look at history.
I think Marx is objectionable because he was, objectively, an awful person. I mean, just to take one single example, look at what he wrote about Ferdinand Lassalle in this letter to Engels:
Interesting vote-to-downvote ratio my comment got. Seems there are a lot more people with anti-libertarian beliefs hanging out at HN at the moment than there are people who lean libertarian.
Since it was not my intention to engage in ideological battle (you'll notice I framed it as "good for your soul and peace of mind" rather than make any kind of political argument for it), I'll leave it there and not reply to any of the answers I got. But it was quite enlightening to see how people reacted to that comment.
I guess to reply to the OG, I’m very conservatively putting a bound on a cozy upper middle class lifestyle locally. Linus lives in Portland, Oregon. There you can comfortably live an upper middle class lifestyle on 200k or 300k. Again, conservatively take the upper bound. 1.5M >> 300k, so it’s more than anyone needs to live a cozy life. Technical needs are much lower, but this is a lazy mathematical proof where I prove the Linus number is bigger than a thing much higher than practical physical and emotional money needs and so don’t need to strictly define them.
In your argument case, those are all “nice to haves” (like much of the stuff in an upper middle class lifestyle), but it would be very difficult to argue they are necessary to live life, even at a relatively wealthy capacity.
Is it? Percentage-wise, executive compensation appears to be lower than well-regarded technology nonprofits[1][2]. In some sense that's extremely weird, since LF is a trade organization rather than a public-interest nonprofit. Their financiers are huge corporations, not individual donors!
(This is the core of the bigger problem with LF, IMO -- they simply don't represent non-corporate OSS interests at all, beyond some lip service.)
Way more people who are doing way less good (many of them are net-negative to society by a very large margin, and we'd all be better off if they stopped going to work) for the world in corporate America make way more money.
Shit, a random L7 SWE or some low level manager makes more money than most of these people.
Not to belabor the point, but LF is a 501(c)(6), not a 501(c)(3). They don't behave like your intuition for a public-interest nonprofit because they aren't one. You shouldn't give them your money!
It's an industry trade association, for the benefit of its members. You aren't one of its members. (I'd suggest spending 60 seconds researching the difference between a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) on wikipedia or whatever.)
I have, maybe you should too. Other than stating it’s not a 501c3, I haven’t heard a compelling argument. I think it’s OK that Linus gets paid to do what he does. Everyone here definitely benefits from this non profit organization. It’s ok we see it differently.
Surprised to learn that some guy I used to work with (Gabriele Columbro) is now apparently a very expensive executive director at the Linux Foundation. I had no idea his career took that turn.
I see a whole boatload of fairly big and important open source infrastructure projects that run on Linux. Sure, maybe 97% of its budget doesn't go directly to the linux kernel, but they're supporting a lot of critical stuff.
The title is misleading in that it makes people think only 3% goes to Linux as a whole, while that number is about the linux kernel only.
Some other comments mention blockchain: one could argue for or against endorsing blockchain technology, but that doesn't seem to be the point of this article.
More than half the money spent on Conferences and Salaries with the rest being functional expenses. Nothing in the "grants" or "benefits to members" column. Prima facie this would not be an organization I would ever donate to.
Which is good because most of their revenue comes from fees and services rendered.
Well this is in line with the fact the LF has been quiet about these new Age Verification laws. The LF should be very vocal about how these laws will hurt Linux.
It is almost seems like the LF wants these laws :(
Alternative names for Linux Foundation is Open Source foundation, User Space foundation or something totally unrelated like Future of Software foundation.
Another angle is that most donations to Linux kernel are in the form of paid employees doing kernel work. I wonder how much the kernel need besides that.
I have some experience with the CNCF and oh boy is it a huge powergrab with excuse of inclusivity, wokeness and all the stuff that comes with it. Rarely seen so many self serving people that are in it for themselves as in the CNCF.
I agree that LF and CNCF have serious conceptual problems but I think finances and executive comp are the least of them. This article is attacking the wrong part.
This isn't Reddit. If you're getting "downvoted" it's because you aren't contributing to the discussion. Bemoaning "Downvotes" is also frowned upon directly
What I see here is a great risk, something not immediately recognizable.
A "hundreds of millions" initiative fueling a "trillions" market.
I suspect that controlling the LF can lead to a really huge power over markets or, at least, a very cheap kill switch.
