For the Linux kernel community, the Linux Foundation hosts its IT infrastructure and organizes
conferences such as the Linux Kernel Summit and the Linux Plumbers Conference. It also hosts a Technical Advisory Board made up of Linux kernel developers. One of these developers has been appointed to sit on the Linux Foundation board.
Conferences The Linux Plumbers Conference has been held annually since 2008. It focuses on the Linux kernel and related tools and libraries, typically lasts 3 days, and was held in the USA primarily for USA-based developers in its early years, but now is regularly held elsewhere in the world.
Goodwill partnership In January 2016, the Linux Foundation announced a partnership with Goodwill Central Texas to help hundreds of disadvantaged individuals from underserved communities and a variety of backgrounds get the training they need to start careers in Linux IT.
Community Specification In July 2020, the Linux Foundation announced an initiative allowing open-source communities to create Open Standards using tools and methods inspired by open-source developers.
Core Infrastructure Initiative The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), is a project managed by the Linux Foundation that enables technology companies, industry stakeholders, and esteemed developers to collaboratively identify and fund critical open-source projects in need of assistance. In June 2015, the organization announced financial support of nearly $500,000 for three new projects to better support critical security elements of the global information infrastructure. In May 2016, CII launched its Best Practice Badge program to raise awareness of development processes and project governance steps that will help projects have better security outcomes. In May 2017, CII issued its 100th badge to a passing project.
Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) Introduced in October 2017, the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) is a legal framework for sharing data. There are two initial CDLA licenses: • The CDLA-Sharing license was designed to embody the principles of
copyleft in a data license. It puts terms in place to ensure that downstream recipients can use and modify that data, and are also required to share their changes to the data. • The CDLA-Permissive agreement is similar to permissive open source licenses in that the publisher of data allows anyone to use, modify, and do what they want with the data with no obligations to share changes or modifications.
Linux.com On March 3, 2009, the Linux Foundation announced that they would take over the management of
Linux.com from its previous owners,
SourceForge, Inc. The site was relaunched on May 13, 2009, shifting away from its previous incarnation as a news site to become a central source for Linux tutorials, information, software, documentation, and answers across the server, desktop/netbook, mobile, and embedded areas. It also includes a directory of Linux software and hardware. Much like Linux itself,
Linux.com plans to rely on the community to create and drive content and conversation.
Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) In 2020 amidst the
COVID-19 pandemic, the Linux Foundation announced the LFPH, a program dedicated to advancing and supporting the virus contact tracing work led by
Google and
Apple and their Bluetooth notification systems. The LFPH is focusing its efforts on public health applications, including the effort's first initiative: a notification app intended for governments wanting to launch their privacy-focused exposure notification networks. As of today, LFPH hosts two contact-tracing apps.
LF Climate Finance Foundation In September 2020, The Linux Foundation announced the LF Climate Finance Foundation (LFCF), a new initiative "to encourage investment in AI-enhanced open source analytics to
address climate change." LFCF plans to build a platform that will utilize open-source open data to help the financial investment, NGO, and academia sectors to help better model companies’ exposure to climate change.
Allianz, Amazon, Microsoft, and
S&P Global will be the initiative's founding members.
LF Energy LF Energy is an initiative launched by the Linux Foundation in 2018 to improve the
power grid. at
LinuxCon North America 2016
Training and certification The Linux Foundation Training Program features instructors and content from the leaders of the Linux developer and open-source communities. Participants receive Linux training that is vendor-neutral and created with oversight from leaders of the Linux development community. The Linux Foundation's online and in-person training programs aim to deliver broad, foundational knowledge and networking opportunities. In March 2014, the Linux Foundation and
edX partnered to offer a free, massive open online class titled Introduction to Linux. This was the first in a series of ongoing free offerings from both organizations whose current catalogue of
MOOCs include Intro to DevOps, Intro to Cloud Foundry and Cloud Native Software Architecture, Intro to Apache Hadoop, Intro to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies, and Intro to OpenStack. In December 2015, the Linux Foundation introduced a self-paced course designed to help prepare administrators for the OpenStack Foundation's Certified OpenStack Administrator exam. As part of a partnership with Microsoft, it was announced in December 2015 that the Linux on Azure certification would be awarded to individuals who pass both the Microsoft Exam 70-533 (Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions) and the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) exam. In early 2017, at the annual Open Source Leadership Summit, it was announced that the Linux Foundation would begin offering an Inclusive Speaker Orientation course in partnership with the National Center for Women & Information Technology. The course is designed to give participants "practical skills to promote inclusivity in their presentations." In September 2020, the Linux Foundation released a free
serverless computing training course with CNCF. It is taught by Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS. Among many other organizations with similar offerings, The Linux Foundation has reported a 40% increase in demand for their online courses in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting social-distancing measures.
Patent Commons Project The
patent commons consists of all
patented
software which has been made available to the
open source community. For software to be considered to be in the
commons the patent owner must guarantee that developers will not be sued for infringement, though there may be some restrictions on the use of the patented code. The concept was first given substance by
Red Hat in 2001 when it published its Patent Promise. The Patent Commons Project was launched on November 15, 2005, by the
Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). The core of the project is an
online patent commons reference
library aggregating and documenting information about patent-related
pledges and other
legal solutions directed at the open-source software community. , the project listed 53 patents.
Open Compliance Program The Linux Foundation's Open Compliance Program provides an array of programs for open-source software licensing compliance. The focus of this initiative is to educate and assist developers (and their companies) on licensing requirements, to make it easier to create new software. The program consists primarily of self-administered training modules, but it is also meant to include automated tools to help programmatically identify license compliance issues.
Agentic AI Foundation In December 2025, it was announced that the Linux Foundation will create the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to host and ensure the open-source, interoperability of AI agents and having an organized product ecosystem. To establish the group,
Anthropic is donating its
Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block is donating Goose (an open source agent framework), and
OpenAI is donating AGENTS.md (instructions that are added to code repositories instructing AI coding tools on how to act). Other organizations that are joining the foundation include:
Amazon Web Services (AWS),
Bloomberg,
Cloudflare, and
Google. == Funding ==