Some changes made to the by-laws get them in hot water

Jan 21, 2016 14:30 GMT  ·  By

The Linux Foundation has recently made some changes to its by-laws and excluded individual members from the voting process for board members.

The Linux Foundation is a non-profit organization that aims to promote and protect Linux and open-source in general. It’s been around for a long time, and it employs Linus Torvalds, among many others. It’s also an organization that gathers some of the big names in the industry under its roof and they need to pay some hefty taxes.

The members are divided by how much money they put on the table each year. According to an article published by Matthew Garrett, the Platinum members come up with $500,000, and we’ll say who they are: Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm, and Samsung.

The rest are the Gold members with $100,000, Silver members with $5,000 - $20,000 depending on the size, and individual members with just $99. These sums of money are per year.

What’s missing from The Linux Foundation

Giving money to The Linux Foundation also comes with some perks. The foundation is run by a board. Platinum companies give ten board members, Gold give three, and Silver just one. To top this all off, individual members could propose two board members.

Matthew Garrett explained that the by-laws of The Linux Foundation have been changed so that individual members can no longer elect board members, meaning that, in theory, the Linux community won’t be represented anymore. It’s possible that some of the other members (from companies) will elect someone from the community, but that’s unlikely.

The Linux Foundation hasn’t said anything at this point. We have already contacted them, but they haven’t responded until now. Hopefully, they will be able to provide us with some answers since this is definitely a very delicate situation that needs to be remedied or at least explained as soon as possible.