The Linux Foundation has reduced the cost of developing the Linux kernel to $6.8 million,

The Foundation has published a report for 2024. In total, during the reporting period, the organization received $292.2 million (a year ago – $263.6 million). Almost half (43% or $125.1 million) of the funds received came from donations and contributions from members of the organization. Last year, $118.2 million was received under this item.

25.1% ($73.6 million, a year ago – $67 million) was allocated to the organization as targeted support for projects; 18.6% ($54.5 million, a year ago – $49.5 million) comes from event support, as well as conference registration fees; 12.3% ($36.1 million, a year ago – $27.2 million) was received as payment for training courses and certificates.

The organization noted that the share of costs associated with core development in total costs decreased to 2.3% from 2.9% in 2023. In 2022 the share was 3.2%, in 2021 – 3.4%. $6.8 million was spent on developing the Linux kernel this year, which is $1 million less than last year and $1.4 million less than the year before.

Image source: Linux Foundation

The total amount of expenses for 2024 is 299.7 million (in 2023 – $269 million). Spending on non-core projects increased from $171.8 million last year to $193.7 million (64.6% of all spending).

Costs for maintaining infrastructure amounted to $22.69 million (7.6%, last year – $22.58 million), costs for training and certification programs – $23.1 million (7.7%, last year – $18.57 million ), corporate operations expenses – $18.9 million (6.3%, last year – $17.1 million), event expenses – $15.2 million (5.0%, last year – $14.61 million), community support costs – $13.7 million (4.5%, a year ago – $13.5 million). International operations expenses increased from $2.96 million to $5.6 million (1.8%).

It is reported that the number of projects supervised by the Linux Foundation is close to 1300, while a year ago there were about 1100. The largest number of Linux Foundation projects are related to cloud technologies, containers and virtualization (23%), network technologies (15%), AI (11 %), web development (11%), cross-technology (9%), security (5%), Internet of things (4%) and blockchain (4%).