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.[…]
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.
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Article seems to imply the Linux Foundation is susceptible to AI-related corruption/pressure.
But of all of the companies listed, Anthropic is the only one I’d consider related to what is implied.
Those other companies are huge conglomerates. They’re some of the biggest companies in the world, with a foothold in just about every sector. You might as well draw correlations to IPv6, SSL, or any other technology. These companies have a vested interest in Linux for a ton of stuff that isn’t related to AI at all. Stuff like network infrastructure and embedded devices come to mind.
yeah this is shit journalism - “just asking questions” with no analysis or knowledge of the topic
he calls out linus who has been as critical of ai as he has been supportive. linus has made it very clear that ai slop > /dev/null
this should be marked as “opinion” or a blog post or just gossip but no. this is what they call journalism at osnews
All of these companies are huge Linux users. It‘s not always malicious intend. Internet companies need Linux for the internet to function.
This explains why Torvalds came out with his opinion about AI. Sold.
It seems to me that what Linus Torvalds thinks about AI is pretty clear. There have been multiple messages from him on the kernel mailing list and interviews too to show this.
The author of this ‘article’ on the other hand seems to be having an issue saying what he really means.
Being vague has always been a popular way of escaping scrutiny (say I, vaguely)
I am a certified AI and big tech hater but I can’t get too mad at Linus’ statement. It’s pragmatic and maintains human accountability for the code.
People complaining about companies not funding the oss software they rely on shouldnt find this to be an issue.
Author fears to say outright that he believes that Linux Foundation is corrupt organisation that takes bribes. First they don’t recieve a lot of money, small IT company I’ve worked before had ten times that money with <5 projects and 5-10 developers at time. Company I’ve worked before that had monthly profit bigger than yearly donations that LF recieves. Developer work costs a lot, menagerial work as well. Second, LF is hard to pressure by these supposed agents of corruption. Third, in the event of LF actually being corrupt they can’t really force LT to say shit, they don’t have ‘or else’ option.
The Linux Foundation is ‘corrupt’, but not for the kernel, funding Linus is the green washing.
The Linux Foundation is a lobbying organisation for Big Tech, not Free Software evangelicals.
Do they claim to be Free Software evangelicals and not a neutral org for big tech? IIRC being a neutral lobbying org is their whole thing.
They didn’t pick the name “Linux” by mistake, it’s a deliberate misdirection for the masses, while having the fallback of “we didn’t lie”.
Same with the subtle move from Free Software to Open Source. They benifit from peoples misunderstanding.
Yes, and? They aren’t the great saviours of Free Software but an entity that serves the purpose to the big tech corps.
None of my points are invalidated.
I wasn’t trying to invalidate you, just discuss the Linux Foundation. But I will bet that “small IT company I’ve worked before had ten times that money” has 10 times less power than The Linux Foundation. And I’ll point out that the Linux Foundation projects get separate funding and engineering from their members.
Obviously, point was that a $<10 milions a year isn’t all that big number for an org size of LF.
Author fears to say outright that he believes that Linux Foundation is corrupt organisation that takes bribes
That’s an interesting perspective. I got the vibe that the writer was suggesting more of a “LF won’t bite the hands that feed them, lest the amount of feeding decrease,” but perhaps I didn’t read between the lines deep enough.
I don’t think the Linux foundation is the reason for Linus Torvalds saying AI is not excluded. This is not what you are claiming, but seems to be the onference of your post. The Linux foundation only spends a tiny fraction of their budget on the Linux kernel.
The whole point if open source is that anyone can contribute. Companies that see the value in Linux can donate. All these AI companies companies do so as it is in their interest to do so due the stability of Linux and its use in servers, now llms. It is the same reason nvidia are rapidly improving their Linux driver support. Web servers didn’t need great support and Linux home users were a tiny fraction of their users. So they didn’t give a toss. Then llms used graphics cards and they saw profit and opportunity. No different to these other companies, they invested where it suited them to, not where tje community wanted.
Limis is smart enough to not rock the boat with sponsorship, but not compromised enough by the reality of required sponsorship, in my view, to change ethos or dorection to chase said sponsorship. These donors, although largest, are worth much less than the thousands of free volunteers and many thousands of smaller donors that won’t contribute to a compromised project.
I think AI is a bubble and is overhyped and I expect a financial crash due to it. I also foresee it is here for good, even though it won’t be the revokution the investors hoped it to be. It is still revolutionary, but with severe flaws. I would like to be in a situation where ai continues to be best run on Linux and small home models are useful for most people rather than a dependence on cloud computing. We are seeing a transition to cloud based infrastructure for comoute, beyond what we’ve seen for storage of discrete consumer data, like photos. That is scary as once the power is gone from consumers to have alternative options from the big 7, the more the risk for society, in the same way that social media has had a terrible effect on data bubbles and personal conflict.
Phones have moved to iterative rather than revolutionary and their costs is going up rather than down. Likely people will choose to upgrade them less. Simolar for computers 10+ years ago unless you’re a bleeding edge gamer. Even then there was the introduction of cloud gaming.
What we need is to continually have consumer options that respect privacy and user rights, which Linux is best placed to do. In doing so, it should offer all available options for computation, which includes ai. As linis says, ai is a tool. It would not make sense to categorically refuse it. Code should be approved based on merit. Already, we are seeing consumer pushback on ai. Spotify, for instance, now marks content as ai. Meta too. Xitter et al. And they all tried to initially pass off slop as content. They are recognising both the poorer quality and the customer resentment about that and adjusting accordingly.
Ai money is a bubble. I’m glad that some of that rich investor money is going to a good cause before the bubble bursts. Many of those companies were already donors before the launch of chatgpt which started the rollout of ai everywhere. Hopefully it continues afterwards. I hope their donations are partly what leads to their downfall, or at least the removal of their monopoly powers.
Just to be clear, the article was written by Thom Holwerda, not me. I posted it here as a novel jumping off point of discussion. (While I don’t like gen AI overall, I am out of the loop as far as kernel development goes, and I don’t really know what to think about Torvalds’ LLM boosterism in that respect. I’m following the discourse, but I take no position as of yet.)
perhaps consortium is a better description
“AI is a tool for maintainers” says Linus and everyone’s losing their shit it seems.
I wonder whose money is behind this article, redefining some of the biggest overall tech companies in the world, all highly dependent on Linux, as “AI companies”.
wonder whose money is behind this article
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No more advertising anymore.
With the author and de facto owner being a translator who says it isn’t enough. He is dependent on engagement more than anything else I suspect.
To be clear: I’m not suspecting him of having been bought to write this - but he clearly has a hate boner for anything AI, isn’t from a software background and wrote an opinion piece with several statements that a re factually incorrect to reinforce a point he’s trying to create to get exactly posts like this.
Follow the money, especially in news.
Does the linux foundation actually spend 7.2 mil? That sounds like a lot tbh, especially for a non-profit.
I don’t know much about how they do things, but they have a pretty long project list
Just curious, what makes you think this is a lot?
Red cross, doctors without borders, Firefox are three that jumped into my mind. I don’t know their legal constructs in detail but Médecins Sans Frontières in their finance report 2024 described half a billion in available assets.
The Linux Foundation is quite small compared to the amount of projects they coordinate in my opinion and I’m surprised to read that you perceive this amount as a lot - that’s why I’m curious where your feeling comes from! (Note: im trying to learn,not bias to “it’s not a lot” is quite weird to me as well, talking about millions of dollars after all)
I have no baseline for thus sort of thing, might be why I thought this was a lot. Considering software engineer salaries alone puts a pretty big dent in this amount.
Yeah makes sense! I find it weird personally that I can go “oh yeah 7mio that’s not a lot” but at the same time “2 bucks for an ice cream scoop are you out of your fucking mind?!”
Soliciting donations mostly ;-)
ReEeeeeeeEeeeEeee AI. Must. Post. Reactionary. Trash. 🤣
