Big Names Like Google Dominate Open-source Funding

Network World’s analysis of publicly listed sponsors of 36 prominent open-source non-profits and foundations reveals that the lion’s share of financial support for open-source groups comes from a familiar set of names. We found 673 companies on the donor rolls of our list of organizations – which was drawn heavily, though not entirely, from the Open Source Initiative’s list of affiliates. Google was the biggest supporter of open-source organizations by our count, appearing on the sponsor lists of eight of the 36 groups we analyzed: Four companies – Canonical, SUSE, HP and VMware – supported five groups each, and seven others supported four. (Nokia, Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Dell, Intel and NEC.) For its part, Red Hat supports three groups – the Linux Foundation, Creative Commons and the Open Virtualization Alliance.

It’s tough to get more than a general sense of how much money gets contributed to which foundations by which companies – suffice it to say, however, that the numbers aren’t large by the standards of the big contributors. According to Pro Publica’s non-profit records, the average annual revenue for the open-source organizations considered in our analysis was $4.36 million, and that number was skewed by the $27 million taken in by the Wikimedia Foundation (whose interests range far beyond open-source software development) and the $17 million posted by the Linux Foundation. ...