Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux. The primary use of the funds it collects is to “help fund the infrastructure and fellows, including Linus Torvalds, who help develop the Linux kernel”. The list of megacorporations donating most of the Foundation’s funds is long.
The Linux Foundation has twelve platinum members, which donate $500000 per year, followed by twelve gold members, who donate $100000 per year. Below these two primary tiers lie the silver peasants, who each donate $5000-$25000 per year, based on number of employees. Looking at the list of twelve platinum members, I noticed something interesting.
Of the twelve platinum companies, six are “AI” companies or companies with massive investments in “AI”: Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM/Red Hat. Then there’s Samsung Electronics, which is raking in stupendous amounts of money thanks to the “AI” bubble. Additionally, one of the gold members is Anthropic, another major “AI” company and makers of “Claude”, the sloppiest of slopcoding tools.
Many of these companies are unimaginably deep in the red when it comes to “AI”, with very little indication they’re ever going to be able to recover any of it. The situation is particularly bad for Oracle and IBM/Red Hat. Oracle’s debt has been downgraded to one notch above junk status because of its “AI” spending, while IBM’s shares experienced the largest crash in its 115 year history only a few days ago. By the way, in the first half of 2025, “AI-related capital expenditures contributed 1.1% to [US] GDP growth, outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion”.
Fun fact: since most of The Netherlands is effectively a swamp, most of the country’s buildings are built on massive wooden or concrete poles (piles) hammered deep into the ground until they hit something more stable than mushy clay and wet sand. Otherwise, buildings in the country would simply sink into the ground. Every Dutch person who ever lived near a construction site has heard the rhythmic kathunk, kathunk, kathunk, all day long, as the massive piledriver machines spread their gospel. I guess something reminded me of this just now.
Anyway, a large chunk of the funding the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvald’s employer, receives is coming from increasingly desperate companies frantically trying to convince a populace deeply skeptical and often downright hostile towards “AI” to spend money on “AI” before the bubble bursts.
For some reason, I thought this was interesting.
Unpopular opinion: Linux foundation is massively overfunded.
It is swimming in money, like Mozilla, to the point that it could operate for decades without ever breaking into the red or earning another penny. And can mostly operate on interest alone.
And yet countless projects and applications on which modern distro are built are operating on fumes. Even many established kernel contributions dont get compensated from the big pot.
Linux Foundation has become a Fifa-like cash cow that sucks in all the funding but never distributes it to the actual grass roots (but does to some equally well funded projects at the top of the pyramid)
Adurbe,
This is unfortunately the fate of many useful organizations, and that is the primary catalyst to why they become completely broken under bureaucracy.
Take Wikimedia, once thriving community of volunteers, is now running sham donation campaigns, since like you mentioned, they also swim in cash, and can operate for many years even if they did not take another cent in at all.
This brings in many long term employees with inflated salaries, whose sole purpose is perpetuating this descructive bureaucracy. They of course also push volunteers out.
I’m not sure whether there is a solution though, EFF, ACLU, even UNICEF became completely ineffective compared to their apparent budgets.
I agree. I think Linux Foundation should donate more money to other critical open source projects eg OpenSSL, GnuPG, Let’s Encrypt