Google ups its Linux Foundation membership to the $500,000/year Platinum level

Probably R&D like Mozilla did with Rust and Quantum. (Long-term pay off)

Things they can't do without 5bn/year. Sometimes you can think about fixing problems, only when you have the resources to do it.

Alternatively, its also possible the administration can go corrupt when there is so much money flying around. Non-profits can do mismanagement their funds.

It would probably improve the code quality quite a bit, but mostly I think they'd use the money for other projects, which is something that happens with big companies, too. The reason you see Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple get into "everything" is because they make so much more money than they need for their primary businesses.

With some of the money, they could fund a team of people to work on system integration, and device-driver reliability for desktop use-cases.

Plenty. E.g. pay for critical infrastructure projects[1][2]—OpenSSL was "manned" by just one or two developers who were grinding themselves to the ground. People barely realized it until "Heartbleed" CVE. Other things such as fund open source internships, improve CI and testing for relevant upstream projects, pay technical writers to make documentation top-notch, hardware resources, and so forth.

[1] https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/ [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/600571/

Love to see Linux Foundation to start do kernel equivalent projects for GPU.

GL driver, openGL Lib, etc all open source for all GPU.

Manage contributions from Intel, AMD, ARM, NVidia and other GPU silicon IP vendors.

The simple goal of opensource, advance the GPU driver, libraries for the benefits of everyone in the field.

After that, maybe define, manage the evolution of "AI" driver, library layers between the TensorFlow (or other AI framework) and the CPU, GPU, TPU.

Target code needed by municipalities.

A long while back, my city paid for a billing system. Was something like 30, 40 million bucks. They did not own the code, or if they did, were not in a position to make that the benefit it should have been.

Long story short, they ended up paying a lot more for support, updates, bug fixes and the like. And then did it again to finally arrive at something workable!

A group of people, myself included took this to government as an example where open code could be a much better investment.

For that same sum, an entity could be created to develop that code, making for local jobs, local revenue and a very likely savings over the long life possible.

Maintenance fees could provide the entity with the staff needed to maintain that code, until it pays for itself.

Additionally, that entity could make it available to other municipalities, and or consult on that problem domain. That turns what us currently a cost center into revenue that could, at a minimum, lower the cost of the utility currently paying way too much for software not really adding that much value.

We got bipartisan support. Industry lobbyists killed it off back then. Our bad. At the time, the thrust was to get OSS written into law as a must consider. The industry arguments and ability to lobby won the day, and were compelling to legislstors who were not well equipped to really grok the potential benefits.

What we shouod have done was push for and more fully develop the plans and non profit model needed to sell it as a project, or investment.

This all happened in the early 00's too. Its a bit different and even more plausible today, and legislators are more likely to understand it all better too.

Open code would mean other projects could build on that effort, and open data would mean the business of the people would be available where and how needed.

A project of this kind would end up sustainable and would yield consistent savings to every municipality using it, whether they developed it or not.

Once done, its a model for similar needs and costs and could be repeated anywhere. An umbrella foundation could unify these things, or several sprout up, each owning a needed domain, each making revenue and ending up self sustaining.

Over time, there would be various entities of this kind solving not sexy, but quite expensive and painful problems that really do need solving.

This kind of thing is not well matched to investors and founders looking to make big returns. The primary value is making public works, utilities, etc. lean, efficient.

It's also not well matched to proprietary software houses, who may well deliver great solutions, but at high margins and with closed and often expensive dependencies. Their solutions could be a bust too.

It's high risk.

Oregon vs Oracle comes to mind.

This kind of thing is well matched to a non profit type effort, or foundation and could easily be seen as a public work, of benefit to everyone, in that taxes, the cost of running the basics in society would be reduced for everyone.

Cheaper, efficient government basically.

Redirect the savings into things like potholes, schools, health care maybe.

With these kinds of resources, or even a modest fraction, a whole lot of good can be done.

Pair developers with domain experts and legislators, city council people and solve some problems. Each solution woukd likely displace closed, expensive software and doing that would be a public good where it's most needed.

While doing this would not make the Microsofts, Oracles of the world happy, it would mean a lot of people get to make a great living, and we all see the benefit of a more lean, efficient use of taxes actually adding value instead of mostly cost to our lives.

It would do the same as Mozilla probably. It would refocus to try to fix the world and social problems while drifting away from its core products.

Advertise for Microsoft all of the great open source work they've contributed to a proprietary OS.

See also Microsoft / clang

There is a major difference between the Apache Software Foundation and the Linux Foundation. The ASF is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. The Linux Foundation is a 501(c)(6) business league.

Donations to a 501(c)(3) are tax-deductible but are very restricted, which donations to a 501(c)(6) are not tax-deductible but are far less restricted. Not coincidentally, the ASF's annual budget is a tiny fraction of the Linux Foundation's.

Microsoft and other big companies are literally getting the stuff for zero dollars.

That they choose to contribute is because it is in their best interest to do so.

Free software is sort of a brain hack in that way: because Linux is successful, it is in Microsoft's best interest to contribute. But that's very different than saying, for example, that Microsoft owes dues and pays them.

I keep hearing this, but the "biggest" contribution was Hyper-V drivers so that Linux could run on Hyper-V. They came in, dumped some bloated drivers, then left and became unresponsive.

>As much as you'd like to paint Linux as a socialist, anti-corporate savior, it's symbiotic relationship with capitalism is what makes it thrive and relevant.

I have been thinking whether this model is purely because of GPL, or would it have been the same if it was Apache 2.0 or other more permissive license?

Or was it because it was so widely used you cant ignore it.

AFAIK, they provide only administrative support (payroll, HR, etc). That's not really "much of" the work on Let's Encrypt.

There's a whole lot of other facilitating not included in that.. like infrastructure (hosting, development, test), management, technical support, etc.

Yeah, I agree. FWIW, I've been participating in Linux Foundation's technical events since late 2012. Not everything they do is golden (w.r.t coordinating with open source communities or partnerships with companies), but for now their strengths outweigh their weaknesses.

They should not grant membership to companies that have a demonstrated history of being hostile to FLOSS. But hey, who would say no to more money, amirite?

They should accept the donation but perhaps think twice about giving away board seats for them

Sure, take their money, but don't give them a seat on the board of the organisation.

By this logic no company that can afford good lawyers would violate any laws. That clearly is not the case, just look at VW diesel emissions scandal for instance.

It wasn't really just EFF PR, but it, for what it's worth (IANAL and this is just my opinion), rested on some very subtle points about which reasonable people disagreed. Here's something I wrote at the time:

https://www.cnet.com/news/vmware-and-the-gpl-round-two/

> I've worked a few gigs, and shipped some products, where we didn't use any GNU software at all.

That's very impressive (assuming you were developing for Linux). I guess no one used Emacs, or GDB, and you were cross-compiling (using Clang and LLD) from Windows or macOS?

>Rewrite popular BSD-licensed software as GPLv3?

What do they rewrite? To the best of my knowledge, they have no problem using BSD licensed software, they just won't develop BSD license software[1] (mostly, though they do approve it here and there for new projects).

[1]. More accurately, they won't approve it for new projects. But the projects are fine.

What happened there? In the 80s they were the next big thing. Then they finished their OS project (when the Linux kernel became available they finally had a FLOSS OS). But they never took off with their high priority projects. Is it that they can't find programmers? Is it that they pay so little that you might as well write your own code and host it on Git*.com?

FreeBSD's kernel offers better performance (on the server) compared to Linux, and the licensing model makes it more attractive to some industries. Whatsapp (server side), Netflix, and the internals of PS3/4 all use FreeBSD code. OpenBSD is actively used in networks, as a firewall (where iptables from Linux is a mess) and other security oriented aspects where stability is also crucial. Linux is popular because it became available to users first than the others back in the 90s, OpenBSD's contributors, on the contrary, are comfortable on not implementing overengineered "features" with the sole purpose on keeping the source clean, stable, and with as less bugs as possible, as a UNIX system should be.

I've a rule: don't consider "give back" to the community things that are strictly aligned to what you need. Google contributes a lot to the Linux kernel by other means as well, but the work to the containers was strategic for them. To really provide something back is to give $$$ or work to just make a project better regardless of your end goals. Otherwise it's great that you are doing it as OSS, but I would not consider it a "give back" from what you got.

Indeed Google has hundreds of engineers dedicated to kernel projects, not just people who are allowed to dabble in it.

That's true, but there's so much open source around and so many critical projects are developed on a shoestring or by time-pressed volunteers. We learned the consequences that hard way with OpenSSL (and at least partially mitigated them since).

An excessive donation could pay for some needed but more workmanlike development, like better open source drivers (or hardware reverse-engineering to create them).

Best, not worst

Is that relevant to the comment you replied to?

It was being used in a lot of Internet infrastructure but IBM investments (and marketing) are what really sent a message that enterprises could safely start using it.