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.
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.
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.
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:
