(2023-05-10) Major Open Source Projects How Much Money Do They Actually Make

Bryan Lunduke: Major Open Source Projects: How much money do they actually make? I collected revenue details for 17 major open source foundations

The immense revenues of Mozilla ($600 Million), The Linux Foundation ($177 Million), and Wikimedia Foundation ($162 Million) really skews the chart.

Let's go ahead and get rid of the Eclipse Foundation as well. Really zero in on the projects that are big, big names in the world of Linux, BSD, and open source.

KDE and GNOME are among the major open source foundations with the smallest revenue. Each barely earning enough to pay for a few full time employees.

The Software Freedom Conservancy (aka "SFC") brings in more revenue than The Free Software Foundation, Apache, and FreeBSD combined.

The Rust Foundation sure does bring in a lot of money. Considering their recent objection to people using the word "Rust"... this raises a lot of questions about what their plans are and what they are using those dollars for.

Thunderbird Revenue jumped to over $6 million last year, in 2022 (the data for this chart is from 2021). Do we really see $6 Million in improvements to Thunderbird every year?