Lenovo and Dell Are Now Funding the Service That Ships Firmware to Millions of Linux Devices
An Anonymous Coward writes:
Good Job Dell and Lenovo! Hope Others Follow You
Only last week, we were talking about how LVFS, the firmware update service for Linux, had turned up the heat on vendors who didn't contribute their fair share.
To tackle that, the project has been going through a phased restrictions rollout that includes things like introducing fair-use download utilization graphs and removing detailed per-firmware analytics.
But that obviously wouldn't solve their lack of funding.
Luckily, two vendors have stepped up. Lenovo and Dell have both signed on as Premier sponsors for LVFS, each putting in $100,000 a year to help fund the project going forward.
They are also the first to reach this tier. Before now, only Framework Computer and the Open Source Firmware Foundation were on as Startup sponsors, contributing $10,000 a year.
Premier is the highest level of financial commitment any vendor can make to the project.
This update was announced yesterday, with the LVFS homepage already reflecting the update. Between the two of them, that's $200,000 a year going into a project that had been running almost entirely on the goodwill of the Linux Foundation and Red Hat.
[...] The vendors still treating LVFS like a free service they have no obligation to support should probably pay attention to what comes next. API access gets cut for non-Startup vendors in August. Automated upload limits follow in December.
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