Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Time to call it quits for the maintainer summit?

On Thu, Aug 6, 2026 at 11:35 AM James Bottomley
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> What got me thinking about this is the obvious funding problem: MS is
> free to attendees, but only had one sponsor in 2024, none in 2025 and
> is on track to have none this year. Since Plumbers has a reasonably
> successful sponsor model and the LF brought the problem up in recent
> conversations, we thought we'd take a look.

[ ... ]

> without
> sponsors the LF is eating the cost of the entire event which, based on
> what Plumbers costs, will be somewhere north of US$100k.
>

Lots of removed context, but I wanted to focus on the urgent topic
first.  I was concerned that the maintainer summit might not have the
funding it needs for 2026 and beyond.

Before twisting internal arms, I asked Angela Brown what MS costs
today and whether the LF felt short-term or long-term structural
changes were needed to continue supporting the event.  The answers
were ~$25K and that no changes are needed for the Linux Foundation to
continue supporting the maintainer summit in its current form.

Another bit of context I removed (please forgive my paraphrasing) was
the idea that MS sponsorship can't be justified based on the outcomes.
I don't think this is true, our respective companies frequently fund
internal leadership summits.  We'd need to be intentional about
finding the sponsors, but the price is fairly reasonable and the
engineering benefits are quite high.

I think the more interesting question is how we ensure MS continues to
provide value to Linus and the maintainers.  Hopefully we can answer
that first and then figure out how to fund things after.

From my slightly-outsider point of view, it's a synchronization point
where we can pin each other down and resolve long standing debates.
And also AI, we can talk about AI.

-chris