fwupd 1.8.0 and 50 million updates

I’ve just tagged the 1.8.0 release of fwupd, with these release notes — there’s lots of good stuff there as always. More remarkable is that LVFS has now supplied over 50 million updates to Linux machines all around the globe. The true number is going to be unknown, as we allow vendors to distribute updates without any kind of logging, and also allow companies or agencies to mirror the entire LVFS so the archive can be used offline. The true number of updates deployed will be a lot higher than 50 million, which honestly blows my tiny mind. Just 7 years ago Christian asked me to “make firmware updates work on Linux” and now we have a thriving client project that respects both your freedom and your privacy, and a thriving ecosystem of hardware vendors who consider Linux users first class citizens. Of course, there are vendors who are not shipping updates for popular hardware, but they’re now in the minority — and every month we have two or three new vendor account requests. The logistical, security and most importantly commercial implications of not being “on the LVFS” are now too critical even for tier-1 IHVs, ODMs and OEMs to ignore.

I’m still amazed to see Reddit posts, YouTube videos and random people on Twitter talk about the thing that’s been my baby for the last few years. It’s both frightening as hell (because of the responsibility) and incredibly humbling at the same time. Red Hat can certainly take a lot of credit for the undeniable success of LVFS and fwupd, as they have been the people paying my salary and pushing me forward over the last decade and more. Obviously I’m glad everything is being used by the distros like Ubuntu and Arch, although for me it’s Fedora that’s at least technically the one pushing Linux forward these days. I’ve seen Fedora grow in market share year on year, and I’m proud to be one of the people pushing the exciting Future Features into Fedora.

So what happens next? I guess we have the next 50 million updates to look forward to. The LVFS has been growing ever so slightly exponentially since it was first conceived so that won’t take very long now. We’ve blasted through 1MM updates a month, and now regularly ship more than 2MM updates a month and with the number of devices supported growing like it has (4004 different streams, with 2232 more planned), it does seem an exciting place to be. I’m glad that the number of committers for fwupd is growing at the same pace as the popularity, and I’m not planning to burn out any time soon. Google has also been an amazing partner in encouraging vendors to ship updates on the LVFS and shipping fwupd in ChromeOS — and their trust and support has been invaluable. I’m also glad the “side-projects” like “GNOME Firmware“, “Host Security ID“, “fwupd friendly firmware” and “uSWID as an SBoM” also seem to be flourishing into independent projects in their own right. It does seem now is the right time to push the ecosystem towards transparency, open source and respecting the users privacy. Redistributing closed source firmware may be an unusual route to get there, but it’s certainly working. There are a few super-sekret things I’m just not allowed to share yet, but it’s fair to say that I’m incredibly excited about the long term future.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you all for your encouragement and support.