> 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.
This 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.
Red 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!).
Why should Red Hat be expected to contribute to Gentoo? A distro is funded by its own users. What distro directly contributes to another distro if it’s not a derivative or something?
Red Hat primarily contributes code to the kernel and various OSS projects, paid for by the clients on enterprise contracts. A paying client needs something and it gets done. Then the rest of us get to benefit by receiving the code for free. It’s a beautiful model.
If you look at lists of top contributors, Red Hat (along with the usual suspects in enterprise) are consistently at the top.
As others mentioned, Red Hat (and SUSE) has been amazing for the overall Linux community. They give back far more than what the GPL requires them to. Nearly every one of their paid "enterprise" products has a completely free and open source version.
For example:
- Red Hat Identity Management -> FreeIPA (i.e. Active Directory for Linux)
- Red Hat Satellite -> The Foreman + Katello
- Ansible ... Ansible.
- Red Hat OpenShift -> OKD
- And more I'm not going to list.
Okd was a mess when i tried to use it years ago. The documentation was just a 1:1 copy-paste of openshift docs despite significant differences in installation. It really wanted you to use OLM but the upstream operators like maestra (the istio based upstream of redhat service mesh) were often very out of date in the catalog to the point of being incompatible with the current version of okd. I raised the issue on GitHub and a redhat employee replied that they were not happy with the situation at the time but to keep asking to show there was interest. I switched to talos instead for a more vanilla k8s where i could actually get a service mesh installed.
Not really comparable to the experiences i have running keycloak where the upstream documentation is complete or freeipa where it’s identical to idm and you can just use the redhat docs. Those are both excellent pieces of software we are lucky to have.
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/dr...
Intel 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.
SuSE/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.
SUSE 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.)
I'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.
I 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.
This, despite the fact that Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc exist because of the hard work and money spent by Red Hat.
And what are those companies doing to fix this issue you claim Red Hat causes? Nothing. Because they like money, especially when all you have to do is rebuild and put your name on other people’s hard work.
And what exactly is incomprehensible? What exactly is it that they’re doing to the Linux desktop that make it so that people can’t fix their own problems? Isn’t the whole selling point of Rocky and Alma by most integrators is that it’s so easy you don’t need red hat to support it?
I think it's fair to say that Red Hat simply doesn't care about the desktop--at least beyond internal systems. You could argue the Fedora folks do to some degree but it's just not a priority and really isn't something that matters from a business perspective at all.
Can you name a company which does care about the linux desktop? Over the years i’m pretty sure redhat contributed a great deal to various desktop projects, can’t think of anyone who contributed more.
Well Red Hat did make a go at a supported enterprise desktop distro for a time and, as I wrote, Fedora--which Red Hat supports in a variety of ways for various purposes--is pretty much my default Linux distro.
So I'm not being critical. Yes, Red Hat employees do contribute to projects that are most relevant to the desktop even if doing so is not generally really the focus of their day jobs. And, no, other companies almost certainly haven't done more.
Certainly, Ubuntu used to be friendlier to new would-be Linux desktop users for a variety of reasons. (And we could get into some controversial decisions/directions it's taken but I won't.) I'm sure lots of people still run Ubuntu although Canonical is less prominent these days. My impression is that Canonical was sort of a passion project of Mark Shuttleworth's and they're just a lot lower key at this point.
It'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.
The 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?
I 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.
I don't get your point. People regularly complain that Wayland has lots of remaining issues and there are always tedious "you're wrong because it works perfectly for me!" replies, as if the fact that it works perfectly for some people means that it works perfectly for everyone.
These days Wayland is MUCH smoother than X11 even with an Nvidia graphics cards. With X11, I occasionally had tearing issues or other weird behavior. Wayland fixed all of that on my gaming PC.
NixOS is anything but a light abstraction (I say this as a NixOS user).
Tbh it feels like NixOS is convenient in a large part because of systemd and all the other crap you have to wire together for a usable (read compatible) Linux desktop. Better to have a fat programming language, runtime and collection of packages which exposes one declarative interface.
Much of this issue is caused by the integrate-this-grab-bag-of-tools-someone-made approach to system design, which of course also has upsides. Redhat seems to be really helping with amplifying the downsides by providing the money to make a few mediocre tools absurdly big tho.
How is it not a light abstraction? If you're familiar with systemd, you can easily understand what the snippet below is doing even if you know nothing about Nix.
NixOS let you build the abstraction you want, and mix them with abstractions provided by others, and this single line illustrates this point extremely well as `sops` is not yet part of NixOS.
Other package managers also provide some abstraction over the packages, and would likely see the same systemd configuration abstracted the same way in post-install scripts. Yet, the encrypted file for `rclone.conf` would come as a static path in `/etc`.
You could resume NixOS as having moved the post-install script logic before the installation, yet this tiny detail gives you additional abilities to mix the post-install scripts and assert consistency ahead of making changes to the system.
Hah I just wrote something similar today to periodically push backups to another server from my NAS.
I agree the systemd interface is rather simple (just translate nix expression to config file).
But NixOS is a behemoth; Completely change the way how every package is built, introduce a functional programming language and filesystem standard to somehow merge everything together, and then declare approximately every package to ever exist in this new language + add a boatloat of extra utilities and infra.
I was referring to working with systemd specifically on NixOS. But yes, the Nix ecosystem is not easy to learn, but once it clicks there is no going back.
Not easy to learn is a bit of a red herring imo. Its also a disproportionate amount of stuff to hold in your head once you have learned it for what it is.
An OS is first of all is a set of primitives to accomplish other things. What classic worse-is-better Unix does really well is do just enough to make you able to get on with whatever those things are. Write some C program to gather some simulation data, pipe its output to awk or gnuplot to slice it. Maybe automate some of that workflow with a script or two.
Current tools can do a bit more and can do it nicer or more rigorously sometimes, but you loose the brutal simplicity of a bunch of tools all communicating with the same conventions and interfaces. Instead you get a bunch of big systems all with their own conventions and poor interop. You've got Systemd and the other Redhat-isms with their custom formats and bad CLI interfaces. You've got every programming language with it's own n package managers.
A bunch of useful stuff sure, but encased in a bunch of reinvented infrastructure and conventions.
Red 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.
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.
Maybe. The background of my comment: in the end of 90's I worked in a company doing professional audio in windows. We had multiple cards, with multiple inputs and outputs, different sampling frequencies, channels, bits per sample... The API was trivial. I learned it in 1 hour.
FF to last year, I was working with OpenGL (in linux), I thought "I will add sound" boy... I was smashed by the zoo of APIs, subsystems one on top of another, lousy documentation... Audio, which for me was WAY easier as video, suddenly was way more complicated. From the userland POV, last year I also wanted to make a kind of BT speaker with a raspeberry pi, and also was terrible experience.
So, I don't know... maybe I should give a try to pipewire, at the time I was done after fighting with alsa and pulseaudio, the first problem I killed it.
This 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?
It 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.
The 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.
...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.
Gentoo is often at the forefront of identifying and helping resolve integration issues between different software projects, particularly when it comes to compiler tech (e.g. fixing packages so they can be built properly with LTO, or with LLVM as well as GCC) or other backend-detail-minutia which makes the whole system better without always being visible to the end user.
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.