Frequently Asked Question

Who are the commercial backers of Linux, and how do they make money?

The three best-known commercial Linux companies are Red Hat (acquired by IBM for $34 billion in 2019), SUSE, and Canonical. None of them sells Linux as a product, they cannot, because the GPL guarantees redistribution rights. Instead they sell subscriptions that bundle binary builds, security updates, certified hardware and software ecosystems, long-term support contracts, and indemnification.

Beyond the named Linux companies, almost every large tech firm now contributes meaningfully to the kernel and surrounding ecosystem. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, Oracle, and Huawei all employ kernel engineers and ship patches. Cloud providers run vast fleets of Linux machines and have strong incentives to keep the upstream healthy: AWS publishes Amazon Linux, Google maintains its own kernel tree and originated Kubernetes, and Microsoft (yes, really) is now among the larger Linux contributors thanks to Azure and WSL. The economics of open source mean maintaining shared infrastructure is cheaper than going it alone.