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Comment by alttab | Hacker News Reader

$500k? When are they going to get serious?

$500k is almost the entire budget of the FreeBSD Foundation. I don't know what the Linux Foundation spends money on, but the FreeBSD Foundation does great stuff with its money.

And if you happen to have a "paltry" $500k sitting around, feel free to send it in FreeBSD's direction. :-)

That may be enough to fund the FreeBSD or even Linux Foundation's budget, but is it enough to make a difference in competing with iOS?

The kernel is just a small part of the software on a phone, of corse, and likely not the crucial differentiator either. Don't forget that Samsung probably uses Linux in a lot of other products too, e.g. TVs.

> I don't know what the Linux Foundation spends money on

At a minimum, Linus. What would you pay him?

Edit: Interestingly he doesn't appear in the Linux Foundation's 990.

And organizing worldwide/regional conferences and meetings maybe?

Yeah, it doesn't sound like a lot, but in terms of what the Linux Foundation actually does I think it's fairly significant. It is the price that the Linux Foundation has set for a platinum membership. If they needed more money, they could have priced it higher.

Other than Linus, the linux foundation doesn't really pay developers. They are just an advisory and steering board, doing a bit of marketing. Samsung contributes much more directly by actually paying for Tizen OS development.

From reading http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/bylaws, it seems that the $500k is the annual membership fee, not a single donation.

Edit: As is also mentioned in the update to the article.

Indeed, FTA:

"Platinum membership is $500,000 per year."

"including fellow Platinum members IBM, Oracle, Intel, Fujitsu and Qualcomm Innovation Center"

So Linux Foundation is getting at least 3MM USD per year now.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members

7 platinums * $500k = $3,5MM

15 golds * $100k = $1,5MM

110 silvers * between $5k and $20k = between $550k and $2,2MM

Total = between 5,5MM and 7,2MM

This is my thinking too. $500k would cover about 2-2.5 developers at Apple/MSFT, and they have many many thousands working on their OSs.

Well, they're more serious than Red Hat (Silver member), SUSE (Gold member) and Google (Gold member though currently doubled via Motorola). How much more serious do you want?

To be fair, that's "serious support of the Linux Foundation", not "serious support of Linux". As I'm sure you're aware, all three of those companies contribute vastly more to the open source community than their mere support of LF.

LF pays for Linus and GregKH, and I'm sure a lot of other good work. It's hardly all of "Linux".

Where I work, that's almost enough to pay for two person years of work (inclusive of all overheads). In other words, it's pocket lint.

fire those two lawyers and hire a gang of engineers.

If you want a gang for $500K, please step over to the postdoc aisle. You might be able to get 4 or 5.

If you take into account the overheads ;)

LOL

^this

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