Re: follow the money, especially in opensource

Retrograde <[email protected]> wrote:
> The Linux Foundation has twelve platinum members[2], 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,

Note that if you add all the amounts donated by those members up you
don't get more than a third of the way to the total "memberships and
donations" they report receiving in their annual report ($133 million
in 2025, pg. 58). So the memberships don't tell you who'se really
providing the greatest share of the funding. Quite possibly some of
those same member companies donate much more money anonymously since
they don't want to highlight their corresponding position of
influence.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Publications/2025%20Linux%20Foundation%20Annual%20Report_122225a_lr.pdf

> 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[3] 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 are also the top employers of Linux kernel code contributors:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1057302/

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