And if you happen to have a "paltry" $500k sitting around, feel free to send it in FreeBSD's direction. :-)
At a minimum, Linus. What would you pay him?
Edit: Interestingly he doesn't appear in the Linux Foundation's 990.
Other than Linus, the linux foundation doesn't really pay developers. They are just an advisory and steering board, doing a bit of marketing. Samsung contributes much more directly by actually paying for Tizen OS development.
Edit: As is also mentioned in the update to the article.
"Platinum membership is $500,000 per year."
"including fellow Platinum members IBM, Oracle, Intel, Fujitsu and Qualcomm Innovation Center"
So Linux Foundation is getting at least 3MM USD per year now.
LF pays for Linus and GregKH, and I'm sure a lot of other good work. It's hardly all of "Linux".
Whilst there has obviously been commercial investment in the past , I'm assuming the majority of it was for enterprise server stuff or embedded things. This is to build user facing stuff.
Perhaps companies are realizing that the only way to escape the nets of MS/Apple and their walled gardens is to invest in open technology.
[1] http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/05/new-ea-games-released-in-...
So your only motivation is to attack Apple? It's not to simply support the legion of open source developers that have been giving you free software for years?
Instead, you're reading commentary from Apple Insider, which is obviously a completely unbiased source, that clearly doesn't believe everything revolves around Apple.
Tizen could be a next-gen mobile/integrated platform, and it could well be that Samsung are the only ones who have anything to do with it, because there is one thing about a Linux-based approach: it is multi-variate. Tizen will be Samsungs Linux, but HTC might do something similar, and Creative Labs could even dust off Plaszma/ZiiOS and produce a shudder effect through the lower-end markets, too.
The Distro Wars won't be over for a while, I think, once this starts happening.
Edit: I want to add that I think that things like the Sharp/Samsung engineers' experience with AngstromOS and so on are sort of behind this.
These companies don't have what it takes to produce something as polished as Android. And even if they throw money at it and manage to do it somehow, they still do not have what it takes to build a developer community around it or a popular app store, like Google or Apple did.
Is anybody anywhere using the Samsung/Kies App Store for instance? It comes bundled on Galaxy S phones, I guess there are some people using it by mistake.
This effort can be easily underestimated, but even Microsoft is having problems doing it.
Samsung is investing much more substantial amounts of R&D money into Tizen, a Linux-based mobile OS with a HTML5 UI layer (co-developed with Intel). That's their real hedge against Apple and Google.
Articles like this make me feel like I'm back on slashdot sometimes. Am I alone?
