The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) is rolling out a “fair use” quota where they will be asking the major hardware vendors (OEMs) to sponsor the project or contribute developer resources for the biggest users that rely on LVFS/Fwupd for serving system and device firmware to customers.
As of last year LVFS has served over 100 million firmware files to Linux users. Making LVFS/Fwupd possible has been Red Hat employing the lead developer Richard Hughes while the Linux Foundation has most recently been covering the hosting costs of LVFS. AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello has also helped out in contributing to LVFS/Fwupd. But beyond that there aren’t any major organizations otherwise providing any significant backing to the project even with LVFS/Fwupd becoming widely relied upon by Linux users for straight-forward system firmware updates and being able to handle other device firmware updates.
Richard Hughes announced a fair-use quota with different sponsorship levels depending upon usage of LVFS. The free quota is intended to cover 50,000 monthly downloads and 50 monthly uploads. From there the “startup” level aims for $10,000 annual contributions for up to one million downloads per month and 150 monthly uploads. The premier level is intended for larger organizations beyond 99 employees and would be $100,000 USD in annual dues while allowing 10 million monthly downloads and 1,500 for the monthly upload quota. As the Linux Vendor Firmware Service is hosted by the Linux Foundation, they are also stipulating Linux Foundation Silver Membership at least as well as an additional code.
As an alternative to the $100K USD annual contribution, allocating one full time software engineer to work on LVFS/Fwupd is also permitted.
More details on the planned fair-use quota policy for LVFS/Fwupd moving forward can be found via this blog post by lead developer Richard Hughes.
