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> The Gentoo Foundation took in $12,066 in fiscal year 2025 (ending 2025/06/30); the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the com
by Y_Y 9mo ago
> The Gentoo Foundation took in $12,066 in fiscal year 2025 (ending 2025/06/30); the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the community. On the SPI side, we received $8,471 in the same period as fiscal year 2025; also here, this is all from small individual cash donations.
It's crazy how projects this large and influential can get by on so little cash. Of course a lot of people are donating their very valuable labour to the project, but the ROI from Gentoo is incredible compared to what it costs to do anything in commercial software.
- Etheryte 9mo agoThis is, in a way, why it's nice that we have companies like Red Hat, SUSE and so on. Even if you might not like their specific distros for one reason or another, they've found a way to make money in a way where they contribute back for everything they've received. Most companies don't do that.
- GrowingSideways 9mo agoRed hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people. It's nice we get good software out of it, but this is not a funding model to glorify. And of course american businesses not producing open source is the single most malignant force on the planet.
- positron26 9mo agoIt's difficult to infer what kind of nuts is going on here.
- GrowingSideways 9mo agoIf we're going to socialize production, let's do it properly.
- MarsIronPI 9mo ago> Red hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people. Red Hat also has a nasty habit of pushing their decisions onto the other distributions; e.g. - systemd - pulseaudio (this one was more Fedora IIRC) - Wayland - Pipewire (which, to be fair, wasn't terrible by the time I tried it)
- anthk 9mo agoPipewire rocks. Wayland it's half baked and a disaster on legacy systems. SystemD... openrc it's good enough, and it never fails at shutdown.
- mogwire 9mo agoPushing their decisions? This is comical. I guess Debian, SUSE, Canonical, etc get that email from Red Hat just go along with it. We better make the switch, we don’t want our ::checks notes:: competitor made at us.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- buckle8017 9mo agosystemd and friends go around absorbing other projects by (poorly) implementing a replacement and then convincing the official project to give up.
- f1shy 9mo agoI don’t know where they come from, but I try to avoid all in that list. To be fair, audio is a train wreck anyway.
- MarsIronPI 9mo agoEh, pulseaudio got a lot better, and pipewire "just works" at this point (at least for me). Even Bluetooth audio works OOTB most of the time.
- tosti 9mo agoYes, that would be nice but when I look at their Grub src.rpm for instance, some of those patches would look original but came from Debian. Back in the day when the boxes were on display in brick-and-mortar stores, SuSE was a great way to get up and running with Linux.
- stakhanov 9mo agoSuSE/openSuSE is innovating plenty of stuff which other distros find it worth to immitate, e.g. CachyOS and omarchy as Arch-derivatives felt that openSuSE-style btrfs snapshots were pretty cool. It's a rock-solid distro, and if I had a use for enterprise support, I'd probably look into SLES as a pretty serious contender. The breadth of what they're doing seems unparalleled, i.e. they have rolling release (Tumbleweed), delayed rolling release (Slowroll) which is pretty unique in and of itself, point release (Leap), and then both Tumbleweed and Leap are available in immutable form as well (MicroOS, and Leap Micro respectively), and all of the aforementioned with a broad choice of desktops or as server-focused minimal environments with an impressively small footprint without making unreasonable tradeoffs. ...if you multiply out all of those choices it gives you, it turns into quite a hairy ball of combinatorics, but they're doing a decent job supporting it all. As far as graphical tools for system administration go, YaST is one of the most powerful and they are currently investing in properly replacing it, now that its 20-year history makes for an out-of-date appearance. I tried their new Agama installer just today, and was very pleased with the direction they're taking. ...so, not quite sure what you're getting at with your "Back in the day..." I, too, remember the days of going to a brick-and-mortar store to buy Linux as a box set, and it was between RedHat and SuSE. Since then, I think they've lost mindshare because other options became numerous and turned up the loudness, but I think they've been quiety doing a pretty decent job all this time and are still beloved by those who care to pay attention.
- tosapple 9mo agoSuSE slowroll is news to me, thanks.
- ghaff 9mo agoSUSE has a lot of ex-Red Hatters at high levels these days. Their CEO ran Asia-Pacific for a long time and North America commercial sales for a shorter period. SUSE has always been pretty big in Europe but never was that prominent in North America except for IBM mainframes, which Red Hat chipped away at over time. (For a period, SUSE supported some mainframe features that Red Hat didn't--probably in part because some Red Hat engineering leadership was at least privately dismissive of the whole idea of running Linux on mainframes.)
- dTal 9mo agoI don't know that Red Hat is a positive force. They seem to be on a crusade to make the Linux desktop incomprehensible to the casual user, which I suppose makes sense when their bread and butter depends on people paying them to fix stuff, instead of fixing it themselves.
- plagiarist 9mo agoI find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services but enraging in how much it has taken over every other thing in an IMO subpar way.
- shevy-java 9mo agoIt's not just systemd, though. You have to look at the whole picture, like the design of GNOME or how GTK is now basically a GNOMEy toolkit only (and if you dare point this out on reddit, ebassi may go ballistics). They kind of take more and more control over the ecosystem and singularize it for their own control. This is also why I see the "wayland is the future", in part, as means to leverage away even more control; the situation is not the same, as xorg-server is indeed mostly just in maintenance work by a few heroes such as Alanc, but wayland is primarily, IMO, a IBM Red Hat project. Lo and behold, GNOME was the first to mandate wayland and abandon xorg, just as it was the first to slap down systemd into the ecosystem too.
- WD-42 9mo agoThe usual semi conspiratorial nonsense. GNOME is only unusable to clickers that are uncomfortable with any UI other than what was perfected by windows 95. And Wayland? Really? Still yelling at that cloud?
- IshKebab 9mo agoI expect people will stop yelling about Wayland when it works as reliably as X, which is probably a decade away. I await your "works for me!" response.
- shevy-java 9mo agoContribute back how and where? Definitely not to Gentoo if we look at the meagre numbers here.
- ihaveajob 9mo agoPresumably, contribute to the entire ecosystem in terms of package maintenance and other non-monetary forms.
- IshKebab 9mo agoRed Hat contributes a huge amount to the open source ecosystem. They're one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel (maybe the biggest).
- Y_Y 9mo agohttps://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2025-01-11&end=2026-01-11 https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo... It looks like they're second to Intel, at least by LF's metric. That said driver code tends to be take up a lot of space compared to other areas. Just look at the mass of AMD template garbage here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/drm/amd https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
- ghaff 9mo agoIntel has long been a big contributor--mostly driver stuff as I understand it. (Intel does a lot more software work than most people realize.) Samsung was pretty high on the list at one point as well. My grad school roommate (now mostly retired though he keeps his hand in) was in the top 10 individual list at one point--mostly for networking-related stuff.
- Cyph0n 9mo agoRed Hat contributes to a broad spectrum of Linux packages, drivers, and of course the kernel itself [1]. One example is virtualization: the virtio stack is maintained by Red Hat (afaik). This is a huge driver behind the “democratization” of virtualization in general, allowing users and small companies to access performant virt without selling a kidney to VMware. Also, Red Hat contributes to or maintains all of the components involved in OpenShift and OpenStack (one of which is virtio!). [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/ https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
- cardanome 9mo agoRed Hat pushing for the disaster that is Wayland has set the Linux Desktop back decades. It is the Microsoft of the Linux world.
- NERD_ALERT 9mo agoWhy is Wayland a disaster? Most of the Linux community is strongly in favor of it.
- smeeagain2 9mo ago[flagged]
- reppap 9mo agoI'm sorry but this is just completely disconnected from reality. Wayland is being successfully used every single day. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's inherently bad.
- smeeagain2 9mo ago[dead]
- reppap 9mo agoAnd that's fine! No one cares! Keep using it!
- smeeagain2 9mo ago[dead]
- notepad0x90 9mo agoThis was exactly what I was going to comment on. Why are they not spending more money?? I don't even know what they should spend it on, but like.. it's Gentoo! I would have thought they'd pay the core devs something?
- distances 9mo agoWhat money? Doesn't sound like they have anything extra?
- notepad0x90 9mo agoThe $104k balance
- f311a 9mo agoYeah, especially when a CSS library makes $1M a year. I guess they have no incentive to improve funding.
- Philpax 9mo ago...is Gentoo large and influential these days? As far as I'm aware, its current cultural status is that of a punchline, but I'm open to being corrected.
- c-hendricks 9mo agoAlso curious of Gentoo's influence in 2026.
- CursedSilicon 9mo agoGentoo's Portage build system is (or at least was?) part of Google's ChromeOS Gentoo also runs the backend infra of Sony's Playstation Cloud gaming service Anecdotal evidence claims it used to also run the NASDAq
- Thaxll 9mo agoHighly unlikely that PSN runs Gentoo. They're using AWS.
- malern 9mo agoI've no idea if Sony uses Gentoo or not, but you can definitely run Gentoo on AWS
- jayofdoom 9mo agoOP's statement matches my understanding; parts were gentoo-based at one point.
- CursedSilicon 9mo agoNot PSN. Sony's Cloud Gaming service. Where they stream an entire PlayStation console to you
- hobobaggins 9mo agoYep. Gaikai.
- sekh60 9mo ago
- stabbles 9mo agoIt would be interesting to have a more accurate estimate of the effective cost of maintaining Gentoo. Say 100 core developers spend 10h/week, and 380 external contributors 2h/week; that's well over 40 FTE, and at $150K per FTE that's $6 million a year.
- elcapitan 9mo agoOTOH, not having money also comes with upsides, like not having overpaid CEOs, managers, marketing people, or distracting side projects.
- TingPing 9mo agoThat’s a 20 million dollar problem, but plenty of projects would be better with a few hundred thousand to pay staff and infra.
- michaelsshaw 9mo agoOur society at its current state will not allow that, however, as it is seen as more important to do stock buybacks and increasing executive pay.
- kortilla 9mo agoThe issue is that gentoo isn’t very popular in the industry. If it catches on with a few well funded tech companies, then it’s easy to get $10k or so from each one in sponsorships at conferences.
- kryptiskt 9mo agoChromeOS uses Gentoo as a base. That doesn't seem to have helped get them any Google money.
- snvzz 9mo agoA small amount of money goes a long way when not wasted in DEI programs.