Open Source Publications | Linux Foundation

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Discover insights from our projects and open technology thought leaders.
Our 2025 Annual Report highlights the impacts our projects, communities and partners have had on the global open source ecosystem and the important work we’ve done to advance the spheres of impact that drive our mission forward. Read on to learn more about “Innovation in the Open” and the progress we’ve made.
Over the past 20 years, the Linux Foundation has grown from managing the Linux kernel to supporting hundreds of open source communities across diverse technologies and industries. The 2025 paper explores how major sectors have embraced open source to drive transformation and innovation.
Our 2024 Annual Report highlights new milestones including growth in members, projects, mentorship, training, research, events, and community engagement, enabling us to make an impact within industries and across technology spheres of influence.
What do some of the world’s largest, most regulated, most complex, centuries-old industries, such as finance, telecom, and energy, have in common with rapid-development, bleeding-edge innovative, creative industries such as the motion pictures industry?
In 2023, the Linux Foundation marked a year of significant growth, welcoming 270 new members and approaching nearly 1,000 active projects, underscoring our commitment to open source innovation.
In 2022, the Linux Foundation, in collaboration with our community, engaged in new initiatives to secure the software supply chain, enabled innovations with social, economic, regional, and environmental impact, supported open industry standards, and continued to embrace diversity and inclusivity.
Today’s economy runs on open source, and organizations must be able to coordinate their internal contributions to open source projects, measure the outcomes, and gather all the different pieces of data, including code contributions, event talks and attendance, project governance, and technical advisory committee roles — It is both painful and ...
In 2021, The Linux Foundation continued to see organizations embrace open collaboration and open source principles, accelerating new innovations, approaches, and best practices. As a community, we made significant progress in the areas of cloud-native computing, 5G networking, software supply chain security, 3D gaming, and a host of new industry ...
There are many business reasons to use open source software. Many of today’s most significant business breakthroughs, including big data, machine learning, cloud computing, Internet of Things, and streaming analytics, sprang from open source software innovations. Open source software often comes into an organization as the backbone of many ...
What do some of the world’s largest, most regulated, complex, centuries-old industries such as banking, telecommunications, and energy have in common with rapid development, bleeding-edge innovative, creative industries such as the motion pictures industry? They’re all dependent on open source software.
With the help of software composition analysis (SCA) tools, software development teams can track and analyze any open source code brought into a project from a licensing compliance and security vulnerabilities perspective. Such tools discover open source code (at various levels of details and capabilities), their direct and indirect dependencies, ...
2020 has been a year of challenges for the Linux Foundation (“LF”) and our hosted communities. During this pandemic, we’ve all seen our daily lives and those of many of our colleagues, friends, and family around the world completely changed. Too many in our community also grieved over the loss of family and friends. It was uplifting to see LF ...
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has become a critical part of the modern economy. It has been estimated that FOSS constitutes 80-90% of any given piece of modern software, and software is an increasingly vital resource in nearly all industries. This heavy reliance on FOSS is common in both the public and private sectors, in both tech and ...
There are many business reasons to use open source software. Many of today’s most significant business breakthroughs, including big data, machine learning, cloud computing, Internet of Things, and streaming analytics, sprang from open source software innovations. Open source software often comes into an organization as the backbone of many ...
In a new Linux Foundation paper, Technical Debt and Open Source Development co-authored by Ibrahim Haddad, Ph.D. and Cedric Bail, M.Sc., the causes and consequences of technical debt are explored in detail. It includes discussions on identifying technical debt, how to minimize it, the role of open source development, and strategies to address the ...
One of the greatest strengths of open source development is how it enables collaboration across the entire world. However, because open source development is a global activity, it necessarily involves making available software across national boundaries. Some countries’ export control regulations, such as the United States, may require taking ...
The first and most important step in negotiating any agreement is always to get the facts. For example, when negotiating a software development agreement, the developers for both parties probably assume that the software will include many pre-existing components written by third parties. If the procurement and legal personnel negotiating the ...
Deployment, distribution, and execution of software and especially services have significantly changed in the last few years. A few years ago, a person had to install a Linux based OS distribution with the necessary software and dependencies — these days, it is now much more common to “spin up a Docker container” and run a service. A container is ...
As cybersecurity incidents have continued to grow in magnitude, frequency, and consequences, both publ