If the Linux Foundation Was a Software Company, It'd Likely Be the Biggest in the World (theregister.com) 20
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has returned to Shanghai for the city's first Kubecon since the pandemic. During a keynote that switched languages several times, demonstrating the challenges faced by both AI and human translators in keeping up, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, threw out several crowd-pleasing statistics while also highlighting some projects likely to make one or two companies squirm a little. On the statistics front, Zemlin joked that the Linux Foundation was likely the largest software company in the world, noting that if one took an average software developer's salary -- he put the worldwide mean as being $40,000 -- and multiplied it by the number of developers contributing to the foundation, the payroll would come to around $26 billion -- more than Microsoft's $24 billion R&D payroll.
The statistic was somewhat tongue in cheek as Zemlin pointed out that none of the developers working on Linux Foundation projects actually work for the Linux Foundation. However, the sheer quantity of engineers involved highlighted another issue noted by Zemlin: the "paradox of choice" when selecting the correct open source project for a given purpose when the number on offer reaches the hundreds, thousands, and beyond. Reflecting the increasing maturity of some elements of the open source world, he also emphasized the opportunities for companies to increase revenues and profits through the use of open source. WeChat, Alibaba, and Huawei all received nods -- unsurprising considering the location -- as Zemlin noted a virtuous circle whereby improvements go back into projects, meaning better profits, meaning more improvements, and so on. It all sounded very utopian, although darkening clouds were signaled by the addition of OpenTofu to the list of projects Zemlin was keen to boast about, including open source efforts around large language models.
The statistic was somewhat tongue in cheek as Zemlin pointed out that none of the developers working on Linux Foundation projects actually work for the Linux Foundation. However, the sheer quantity of engineers involved highlighted another issue noted by Zemlin: the "paradox of choice" when selecting the correct open source project for a given purpose when the number on offer reaches the hundreds, thousands, and beyond. Reflecting the increasing maturity of some elements of the open source world, he also emphasized the opportunities for companies to increase revenues and profits through the use of open source. WeChat, Alibaba, and Huawei all received nods -- unsurprising considering the location -- as Zemlin noted a virtuous circle whereby improvements go back into projects, meaning better profits, meaning more improvements, and so on. It all sounded very utopian, although darkening clouds were signaled by the addition of OpenTofu to the list of projects Zemlin was keen to boast about, including open source efforts around large language models.
open source is just Early Access (Score:2)
We see the results of the Early Access open source gives us by companies converting to subscription or pay models.
Re: open source is just Early Access (Score:3)
That does not magically scrub the previously-open source from the internet, if it was publicly available.
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Re: open source is just Early Access (Score:2)
And that mentality right there contributes to the problem.
Free workers (Score:5, Insightful)
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How much has Stallman actually contributed to the Linux kernel? The Linux Foundation concerns with the Linux kernel itself.
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Where would the Linux Kernel be without gcc (GNU cc) ? I would say at best, we would all be on a BSD if gcc did not exist (not a bad thing). But more than likely we would all be locked into a Microsoft Walled Garden.
But time has a way of evening things out, Microsoft has its hand in the Linux Foundation to a large extent. Along with IBM, seems to me the foundation is moving slowly to being a corporate puppet.
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If the Linux Foundation had to pay its workers and sell its products, it would be bankrupt.
Or just another Microsoft. Thankfully, it's neither.
Volunteers? More like poor voluntears! (Score:2)
And shortly thereafter it would be bankrupted as all the regulators many of you love suddenly become concerned all this volunteer work should be paid, as it taks advantage of volunteers, and also undercuts labor wages.
Don't laugh. They've tried exactly this.
Re:Volunteers? More like poor voluntears! (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of the "volunteers" are actually being paid by other software companies who use Linux and need enhancements.
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For reference (Score:2)
In case there's any question about Linux [9cache.com].
Take All Of MicroSofts' & Apples' Money (Score:2)
And give it to Torvalds. Balance achieved.
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LF are in some ways Poor Stewards for OSS (Score:1)
The Linux Foundation is to be commended in that it puts on great conferences and quite a number in the average year.
The Linux Foundation is great at raising money. If you look at their US non profit filings the amount of cash they've amassed is impressive. It does show how much faith and trust industry has in supporting the LF.
But.
The vast majority of Linux Foundation projects are made up of committees that produce very little engineering, These committees are tuned to extract cash from company sponsorship.
If KDE was compensated for KHTML⦠(Score:2)
It is interesting to imagine how would be the KDE Foundation if it was compensated for developing KHTML, of which forks form the rendering engine of most browsers.