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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. Peo

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.

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.