7 ms·

Serious question, what would the Linux foundation do with 5bn/year?

fabianhjr 8y ago
Probably R&D like Mozilla did with Rust and Quantum. (Long-term pay off)
pavs 8y ago
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.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  $500M in charitable donations to Haiti through the Red Cross seems to have gone missing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15326335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15326335 The average person deserves to know how badly charity, foreign aid, and government programs can often be at improving human welfare. Not always, but often.
  - blacksmith_tb 8y ago
    Very true[1] but I would suggest that the Red Cross is unusually unreliable (I always wince when I see people earnestly recommending them, there are hundreds of NGOs which are more efficient and transparent). 1: https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
  - smt88 8y ago
    You're right that it should be a consideration, but Red Cross is an egregious example. Any human organization is inefficient and leaky, though. That doesn't mean we have a significantly better way to fix unprofitable problems than the types of orgs you mentioned.
mtgx 8y ago
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.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  > 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. The reason? No, at least one major reason is they need to diversify their revenue streams. Google for example has been desperately trying to find something to offset their lopsided dependence on ad revenue for ages, because their party will come to a grinding halt real quick if they lose a large share of the eyeballs. Why do you think Google has given so much money to Apple to stay on their platform as the search provider? It's not a good position to be in.
  - skj 8y ago
    > It's not a good position to be in. I mean, I get what you're saying... but honestly making 15b profit per quarter is really a pretty good position to be in.
ksk 8y ago
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.
kashyapc 8y ago
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/ https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/ [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/600571/ https://lwn.net/Articles/600571/
- scrollaway 8y ago
  All the replies I got seem to address the question "What would LF do with $500MM/yr", not the question of "what would it do with the remaining 4.5bn".
  - kashyapc 8y ago
    Okay, here is something potentially bold (given Intel is also a Platinum Member of the Linux Foundation): How about exploring the frontiers of open hardware (RISC-V)? The back-of-the-envelope calculation from an LWN comment[+] (on the discussion "Is it time for open processors?") by Jon Masters, jcm, of Red Hat (but speaking for himself): [quote] The problem with an "open" processor is the cost. It costs over $1.2 Billion to do a ground up 4 year OoO core of the kind of competitive performance that others have built. And even then, once silicon is deployed, security issues can still be found. In short, it will never happen. You'll get RISC-V cores like BOOM, you'll see some wonderful IoT designs, but you'll never see a high end Xeon-class core unless some billionaire funds it as a pet project, and keeps investing year after year for the greater good. And no, none of the major search/cloud vendors are going to go fund this - they want to make commercial vendors compete. [/quote] I think it's a really "long shot", but we can dream. :-) [+] https://lwn.net/Articles/743602/ https://lwn.net/Articles/743602/
- stuckinarut 8y ago
  > People barely realized it until "Heartbleed" CVE at which point they proceeded to shit on those devs for being so awful at maintaining a critical project. It was nasty and unwarranted.
srcmap 8y ago
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.
- oliwarner 8y ago
  These all already exist in some form. Mesa plus in-tree drivers.
ddingus 8y ago
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.
parvenu74 8y ago
Pay more people to steal code from FreeBSD and other permissive-licensed projects and shackle it in the bondage of Copyleft.
BartBoch 8y ago
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.
techntoke 8y ago
Advertise for Microsoft all of the great open source work they've contributed to a proprietary OS.

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

pavs 8y ago

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.

wallace_f 8y ago
$500M in charitable donations to Haiti through the Red Cross seems to have gone missing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15326335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15326335 The average person deserves to know how badly charity, foreign aid, and government programs can often be at improving human welfare. Not always, but often.
- blacksmith_tb 8y ago
  Very true[1] but I would suggest that the Red Cross is unusually unreliable (I always wince when I see people earnestly recommending them, there are hundreds of NGOs which are more efficient and transparent). 1: https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
- smt88 8y ago
  You're right that it should be a consideration, but Red Cross is an egregious example. Any human organization is inefficient and leaky, though. That doesn't mean we have a significantly better way to fix unprofitable problems than the types of orgs you mentioned.

mtgx 8y ago

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.

newnewpdro 8y ago
> 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. The reason? No, at least one major reason is they need to diversify their revenue streams. Google for example has been desperately trying to find something to offset their lopsided dependence on ad revenue for ages, because their party will come to a grinding halt real quick if they lose a large share of the eyeballs. Why do you think Google has given so much money to Apple to stay on their platform as the search provider? It's not a good position to be in.
- skj 8y ago
  > It's not a good position to be in. I mean, I get what you're saying... but honestly making 15b profit per quarter is really a pretty good position to be in.

ksk 8y ago

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.

kashyapc 8y ago

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

scrollaway 8y ago
All the replies I got seem to address the question "What would LF do with $500MM/yr", not the question of "what would it do with the remaining 4.5bn".
- kashyapc 8y ago
  Okay, here is something potentially bold (given Intel is also a Platinum Member of the Linux Foundation): How about exploring the frontiers of open hardware (RISC-V)? The back-of-the-envelope calculation from an LWN comment[+] (on the discussion "Is it time for open processors?") by Jon Masters, jcm, of Red Hat (but speaking for himself): [quote] The problem with an "open" processor is the cost. It costs over $1.2 Billion to do a ground up 4 year OoO core of the kind of competitive performance that others have built. And even then, once silicon is deployed, security issues can still be found. In short, it will never happen. You'll get RISC-V cores like BOOM, you'll see some wonderful IoT designs, but you'll never see a high end Xeon-class core unless some billionaire funds it as a pet project, and keeps investing year after year for the greater good. And no, none of the major search/cloud vendors are going to go fund this - they want to make commercial vendors compete. [/quote] I think it's a really "long shot", but we can dream. :-) [+] https://lwn.net/Articles/743602/ https://lwn.net/Articles/743602/
stuckinarut 8y ago
> People barely realized it until "Heartbleed" CVE at which point they proceeded to shit on those devs for being so awful at maintaining a critical project. It was nasty and unwarranted.

srcmap 8y ago

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.

oliwarner 8y ago
These all already exist in some form. Mesa plus in-tree drivers.

ddingus 8y ago

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.

parvenu74 8y ago

Pay more people to steal code from FreeBSD and other permissive-licensed projects and shackle it in the bondage of Copyleft.

BartBoch 8y ago

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.

techntoke 8y ago

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