The things nobody wants to pay for

So here's a problem I've been thinking about a bit. I'm a fairly senior engineer at a sizable tech company (1000+ engineers and a whole lot of servers that run Linux). We understand and believe in open source. We have a workable open-source contribution process, and we employ core contributors to a couple of projects we care specifically about. We donate money to various foundations and sponsor conferences that fairly explicitly use their proceeds to fund their associated project. But we benefit a whole lot from, say, the Linux kernel existing, and we have very few opportunities to help with code (because it works so well!) and we aren't funding any regular work on upstream Linux. (We run upstream stable kernels on top of Debian, so there isn't an obvious commercial vendor or even a distro packager for us to buy a support contract from.)

What should we do, and how do I, as someone with some amount of influence but no actual spending authority, get us to do it?

The Linux kernel contribution maturity model (https://docs.kernel.org/process/contribution-maturity-mod...) does not seem particularly relevant to us. We're not a hardware vendor or otherwise in the business of writing kernel code. We're at level one - we can and do contribute patches to the Linux kernel, in practice every couple of years. Level two suddenly talks about people being expected to contribute as part of their job and having my contributions assessed in performance reviews. That's a drastic step up! I cannot figure out what an employee who has sent in the occasional patch (like me) would possibly do to work on the Linux kernel with even 10% of my time year-round. I'm honestly not sure LKML would really want me to dive in and say "Look guys, my boss told me to contribute, so I'm just going to keep refactoring this subsystem." And the people who do my performance reviews aren't really in a spot to evaluate my contributions beyond whether they happened or not.

Besides, this article is mostly about specific existing projects and specific existing contributors talking about whether they can do them, not the need for new blood in general. (There are other articles about that.)

So, okay, let's not think about contributing more code ourselves. Greg KH points out that there isn't enough testing because companies aren't funding the work. We'd love more testing, it would make us more confident in upgrades. Where do we send a check? (Again, I have contributed to the kernel a little bit, and I have no idea what I would be asking my company to do.) The Linux Foundation gets a good bit of corporate money, as I understand ($177M from their last form 990). Does that money go to this sort of work? If we send LF a small amount more money, would it fund this work?

More importantly, how do I convince my company that this is a good use of our money? I doubt I can convince my employer to sponsor even one full-time engineer at the wages we pay our full-time engineers; we have enough problems of our own to solve, and as important as kernel testing is, it's not as important as anything else we could put one full-time engineer on. (We run at a scale large enough to see kernel regressions that weren't caught by anyone else, so it would concretely help us, but we don't run at a scale large enough that it's regular: it happens about once every few years.) We certainly benefit from Linux in general, but we're not talking about paying to make sure we can keep using Linux at all, we're talking about making the development process a little faster and a little more reliable. But the argument in the article about tooling paying off compounding rewards is an interesting one. Is there a compelling argument that it really is a good use of our money to fund the kernel by an entire engineer's salary?

Or let's say that we want to contribute a fraction of an engineer's salary. How do I convince the people who sign checks that this money is going to go somewhere useful? It won't make any of the existing contributors have more hours in the day (or would it? is part of their income coming from Linux-irrelevant private consulting work that they could stop doing?). I suppose we and many other companies like us could collectively fund one engineer, but how do we get that to happen?

(Is this a question for us the corporate users to answer? Like should we be proactively reaching out to other companies in our industry and saying, hey, all of us get value from Linux being good, let's collectively fund someone?)

Or maybe funding development time isn't the right thing to focus on. I see in the thread some talk about KernelCI. Would contributing money to KernelCI to buy more machines or more public cloud time help? If I go to the KernelCI home page, there's a "contributions welcome!" button ... that links to GitHub. A little bit below, it says, "Learn how your organization can contribute to the project now," but the way to learn is to send someone an email. What does it mean to join? And then there are logos of a couple of companies below it, at least a few of which are much larger than we are and care much more than we do about Linux development. Are they contributing so much that we'd be a drop in the bucket? I have no idea. Nothing on the website answers the question about how much money KernelCI is spending and whether they could productively spend more (but it does have some brand guidelines, great).

Or maybe I'm totally off base here, and when Greg KH and others are talking about "companies," they are actually talking about gold/platinum members of the Linux Foundation who are already contributing a lot but could still justifiably employ several more individuals full time on upstream kernel work, and non-huge companies like mine are just not part of the conversation, and articles like these aren't intended for people like me to try to get our employers to contribute more. So maybe a simpler question is - in an ideal world, where everyone in my employer's management was completely and accurately convinced of the need to fund Linux kernel development, would that accurate funding really be more than the almost-zero it is now? (One argument in this direction is we pay quite a bit of money to our hardware and cloud vendors, and a feature of their product is compatibility with upstream Linux, so we're already doing the thing that ought to fund kernel development. In that case, perhaps what I really should do is tell our account reps at those companies - all of which are already gold/platinum members of the LF with full-time kernel developers on staff - that we want to see them funding this work even more.)