It was announced with Kubernetes 1.0, an open source container cluster manager, which was contributed to the foundation by Google as a seed technology. Today, CNCF is backed by over 450 sponsors. Founding members include Google, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Twitter, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Docker, Univa, and VMware.

How is Linux funded?

But major information technology firms invest funds and employee time into the developing the Linux operating system kernel. The biggest single group, “None,” consists of developers working on their own time. But the lion’s share — 86.1 percent of contributions — was from organizations.

Who pays for Linux?

During the period of this most recent 2016 report, the top contributing companies to the Linux kernel were Intel (12.9 percent), Red Hat (8 percent), Linaro (4 percent), Samsung (3.9 percent), SUSE (3.2 percent), and IBM (2.7 percent).