tl;dr: I’m asking the biggest users of the LVFS to sponsor the project.
The Linux Foundation is kindly paying for all the hosting costs of the LVFS, and Red Hat pays for all my time — but as LVFS grows and grows that’s going to be less and less sustainable longer term. We’re trying to find funding to hire additional resources as a “me replacement” so that there is backup and additional attention to LVFS (and so that I can go on holiday for two weeks without needing to take a laptop with me).
This year there will be a fair-use quota introduced, with different sponsorship levels having a different quota allowance. Nothing currently happens if the quota is exceeded, although there will be additional warnings asking the vendor to contribute. The “associate” (free) quota is also generous, with 50,000 monthly downloads and 50 monthly uploads. This means that almost all the 140 vendors on the LVFS should expect no changes.
Vendors providing millions of firmware files to end users (and deriving tremendous value from the LVFS…) should really either be providing a developer to help write shared code, design abstractions and review patches (like AMD does) or allocate some funding so that we can pay for resources to take action for them. So far no OEMs provide any financial help for the infrastructure itself, although two have recently offered — and we’re now in a position to “say yes” to the offers of help.
I’ve written a LVFS Project Sustainability Plan that explains the problem and how OEMs should work with the Linux Foundation to help fund the LVFS.
I’m aware funding open source software is a delicate matter and I certainly do not want to cause anyone worry. We need the LVFS to have strong foundations; it needs to grow, adapt, and be resilient – and it needs vendor support.
Draft timeline, which is probably a little aggressive for the OEMs — so the dates might be moved back in the future:
APR 2025: We started showing the historical percentage “fair use” download utilization graph in vendor pages. As time goes on this will also be recorded into per-protocol sections too.
JUL 2025: We started showing the historical percentage “fair use” upload utilization, also broken into per-protocol sections:
JUL 2025: We started restricting logos on the main index page to vendors joining as startup or above level — note Red Hat isn’t sponsoring the LVFS with money (but they do pay my salary!) — I’ve just used the logo as a placeholder to show what it would look like.
AUG 2025: I created this blogpost and sent an email to the lvfs-announce mailing list.
AUG 2025: We allow vendors to join as startup or premier sponsors shown on the main page and show the badge on the vendor list
DEC 2025: Start showing over-quota warnings on the per-firmware pages
DEC 2025: Turn off detailed per-firmware analytics to vendors below startup sponsor level
APR 2026: Turn off access to custom LVFS API for vendors below Startup Sponsorship level, for instance:
/lvfs/component/{}/modify/json/lvfs/vendors/auth/lvfs/firmware/auth
APR 2026: Limit the number of authenticated automated robot uploads for less than Startup Sponsorship levels.
Comments welcome!
Seems very reasonable.
As a general concept I think it makes sense, and 1¢/download is a pretty fantastic price for the level of reach LVFS provides.
I am concerned that this might impact the ability to attract new companies that don’t currently use LVFS.
Some mitigations I can think of might be:
* Associate tier loses access to analytics only when over the quota
* Explicitly list onboarding support as a benefit for higher tiers
Good idea about the analytics, I’ll do that. For the onboarding, I’m planning to continue to do that for all account levels, as before.