The Next LVFS Actions Begin Tomorrow To Encourage More Hardware Vendors To Step Up

Last year the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) announced plans for major vendors to pay or contribute code to this project that makes it easy for deploying new system and device firmware on Linux systems. They are asking those with less than 99 employees to contribute $10k USD annually or those larger organizations to contribute $100k USD annually or to be employing engineer(s) to work full-time on LVFS/Fwupd. Beginning tomorrow the next phase of their transition to encourage vendors to support the open-source project goes into effect.

Per the plans announced last year, beginning on 1 April, the LVFS will begin showing over-quota warnings on per-firmware pages. These are warnings if a given firmware receives more than 50k monthly downloads. Here is their example over-quota warnings that will be shown on affected firmware pages:

Another change happening is that per-firmware analytics exposed to vendors will also be turned off for vendors not at least at the "startup sponsor" level of $10k USD annually.

A reminder was sent out this week that these changes will indeed go into effect starting Wednesday.

Per Fwupd.org, current startup sponsors for LVFS are Framework Computer and the Open-Source Firmware Foundation. Engineering support sponsors are the Linux Foundation and Red Hat.