Publications

Reports and Guides from the Linux Foundation

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Explore Linux Foundation Publications

Discover insights from our projects and open technology thought leaders.

Rising Tides of Open Source

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.

Linux Foundation Annual Report 2022: Leadership in Security and 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.

Open Source: The Missing Data and Management Layer

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 ...

New Horizons for Open Source

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 ...

TODO Group: Why Open Source matters to your enterprise

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 ...

Software-defined vertical industries: transformation through open source

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.

An open guide to evaluating software composition analysis tools

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, ...

Linux Foundation Annual Report 2020

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 ...

Report on the 2020 FOSS Contributor Survey

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 ...

Linux Kernel History Report 2020

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 ...

Solving technical debt with open source

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 ...

Open Source Software Supply Chain Security

As cybersecurity incidents have continued to grow in magnitude, frequency, and consequences, both public and private sector attention has turned to questions of what, if anything, organizations may do to better manage the risks of today’s modern, connected world.

Improving Trust and Security in Open Source Projects

When you take a step back and think about the volume of emerging technology and think about industry trends such as increasing the velocity of software releases and the reuse of code and services, you could be forgiven for holding your hands up and concluding that things are trending in the wrong direction for us to ever have secure software.

Enterprise Open Source: A Practical Introduction

If your company is involved in software engineering, it is very likely you already use open source software in your products or services; if so, you must have an open source strategy to ensure you are making the best use of open source software while protecting yourself from potential risks and liabilities.