I’ve long been involved with the Linux Foundation (LF). In 2000, a consortium of companies, including IBM, HP, and Intel, founded the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a non-profit organization to support the continued development of Linux and promote its use in enterprise computing, which A few years later, in 2007 the OSDL merged with the Free Standards Group to become the Linux Foundation. At the time, I was leading the Linux initiative that IBM had launched in January of 2000 to embrace Linux across all the company’s products and services.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger at Linux World, February 2000.
In 2011, when the LF marked the 20th anniversary of Linux at its annual Linux conference, I had the privilege of giving a keynote presentation where I recounted my personal involvement with Linux and open source.
Over the past decade, the LF has undergone a major expansion, as open source became widely accepted as a paradigm for innovation across a full suite of technologies, proving its utility beyond scaling the operating system. Its impact is felt across just about all industry sectors in our fast growing digital economy. Consequently, its annual conferences were rebranded Open Source Summits to be more representative of the LF’s expanded open source mission beyond Linux. In April of 2021, the LF announced the formation of Linux Foundation Research to broaden the understanding of open source projects and to explore new opportunities for open source initiatives. And later that year, Hilary Carter, LF’s then VP of Research invited me to become a member of the LF Research Advisory Board.
Frankly, I was truly impressed by the scope of the Linux Foundation. The LF now includes over 1,800 company members, supports approximately 1,000 open source projects in a variety of vertical and horizontal industry sectors, holds over 250 events around the world every year, and provides training and certification programs to equip developers with essential skills, not just for coding, but to support the management and best practices of projects themselves. The mission of the LF was quite easy to explain when it was mostly focused on Linux, but it’s quite a bit more complex now.
Irving giving a keynote presentation at LinuxCon 2011 in Vancouver, Canada
LF’s Executive Director Jim Zemlin recently addressed the difficulty of explaining what the LF does and how it works in one of his weekly newsletters to the LF board and team members. Zemlin wrote that beyond the technical community, many don’t understand much about how the LF operates. For example, the important role of the LF’s company members in sponsoring open source projects and hiring developers. In particular, most, if not all, of the key maintainers of LF’s largest projects are not volunteers but full-time employees of member companies.
“Sadly, they are not alone; you can find other examples on the internet and even in our own communities,” added Zemlin. “It is a lesson in humility to know that not everyone will understand or appreciate our work. An important mission for all of us for the coming year is to explain better how the Linux Foundation works and what we do. That so much confusion remains signifies we have a long way to go in telling our story and making it clear. As we grow more prominent, it is a question we will need to answer frequently and well.”
Zemlin’s newsletter included a link to a keynote on the State of the Foundation which he gave at an Open Source Summit in Tokyo in December of 2023. In his keynote, Zemlin aimed to explain what the LF actually does and why. I found the keynote quite interesting, so let me discuss some of its key points.
What exactly is it that the Linux Foundation does? “This is a question that I get asked all the time,” said Zemlin. “I think it's important to understand the function of organizations like ours and how we work relative to technology companies, software developers, and governments.”
“My friends think that we travel all around the world speaking at wonderful events. My mom thinks that I’m saving the world. Society thinks that we're crazy socialists, that we create software and give it away for free. Developers think that we just take money, waste money, and take credit for their work.”
“I think that we're actually kind of like the supporting cast or the janitors of open source.” The Linux Foundation takes care of all the boring but important stuff necessary to support software development so that developers can focus on code. This includes events, project marketing, project infrastructure, finances for projects, training and education, legal assistance, standards, facilitation, open source evangelism, and much, much more.”
Does the LF just support open source software projects? No, although that’s the majority of what the LF does. The LF supports a spectrum of collaborative innovations, including open source software, open hardware, data sharing networks, industry standards, international standards, and community specifications.
“I predict that we'll see a lot more data sharing efforts at the Linux Foundation in 2024 as people start to understand that in order to take advantage of artificial intelligence technology and large language models, it's very important to understand how to procure data, as well as tracking what data is being used in AI models so that everyone can trust that technology.”
How does the LF decide what to work on? The LF makes its decisions by asking three questions about impact, collaboration, and resources.
Ecosystems and virtuous cycles. The LF supports close to 1000 of the most important projects in the world. Successful projects depend on building the right ecosystem, including members, developers, standards, and infrastructure that will develop products that the market will adopt.
Open source is highly successful when it helps build the right virtuous cycle. This means that the company using it is successful and makes money; its developers then contribute back to open source projects with bug fixes and performance improvements, leading to better projects, better products, and more profits; and more investment then flows back to the project.
The economic value of open source. In 2022, Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, spent around $22 billion in research and development. It may come as a surprise to learn that the LF is right up there as one of the largest, most impactful software companies in the world, based on a simple formula. To estimate the economic value of open source development, Zemlin looked at all the projects across the Linux Foundation, and all of the developers who contribute to those projects. In any given year, there are at least 600,000 developers working on open source projects around the world. The overall average salary for software developers across different countries is about 43,000 USD, ranging from Nigeria at the low end and the US at the high end. After multiplying these two numbers, the global economic value of open source is roughly over 25 billion USD.
A recent Harvard Business School study led by Frank Nagle estimates the supply-side value of widely used open source software to be 4.15 billion USD, with the demand-side value to be double that, as high as 8 trillion USD. These conclusions support an earlier study conducted by LF Research in partnership with open innovation pioneer Henry Chesbrough of UC Berkeley, which found that the economic benefits of open source software are rising faster than costs, and that the cost/benefit ratio is also rising. In terms of impact, the contributions of the LF to the global digital economy are indisputable.
The Linux kernel remains the single most important software development effort in the world, powering a significant portion of the world’s servers, smartphones, embedded devices and supercomputers. Linux continues to grow, adapting to and adding significant value to new forms of computing. Fortune Business Insight estimates that the global market value of Linux is projected to grow at a CAGR of 19.4% from $21.77 billion in 2024 to $89.76 by 2032.
The personal impact on people. “Every time I come to a Linux Foundation event, at some point someone will run up to me and say Jim, I just want to thank you,” Zemlin said. “The Linux Foundation really changed my life. You offered me a scholarship to come to an event. I met my new employer and I got a job because of the chance that the Linux Foundation gave me to attend these events. Or I meet a developer who says, you know, I participated in a kernel mentoring program and as a result of that mentoring program, I got a life changing job at a company I love to work for.”
The LF has a number of education and certification programs, which now trains over 3 million developers on open source related technologies. Aspiring Linux kernel developers should check out the Linux Kernel Mentorship Program.
How do you define success in the Linux Foundation? “In the last few minutes I want to tell you the secret of the Linux Foundation,” said Zemlin in his keynote’s closing remarks. Remember that we have to work with over 600,000 developers every day, almost all of which do not work for us. To achieve impact, we have to lead through influence. “And so, the secret to the Linux Foundation are these three words: Helpful, Hopeful, and Humble.”
I hope that these reflections encourage people to learn more about the Linux Foundation, its projects, and its numerous collaborative support programs, and to understand why it has the significant impact on our world that it does today. There are dozens of openly accessible research reports and free courses, hundreds of webinars and sessions to view, and community events taking place around the world to get you started. Above all, I encourage you to get involved.