The Linux Foundation Member Summit 2025

Join us to explore OpenMDW, a first-of-its-kind open license designed for AI models, datasets, parameters and associated artifacts. OpenMDW eliminates ambiguity, offering clear, permissive rights for use, modification, and distribution—empowering developers, researchers, and enterprises alike.

With an MIT-like style, OpenMDW includes an explicit patent grant, unrestricted use of outputs, and alignment with the Model Openness Framework, ensuring shared components have proper legal rights while respecting contributors' boundaries. It strikes the perfect balance between openness and protection, enabling innovation without mandating the release of all model elements.

Discover how OpenMDW fosters trust, transparency, and supports innovation and research, while reducing legal risks and driving industry collaboration.

This session is your opportunity to shape the future of open AI. Don’t miss it!

Open source software has become ubiquitous and can be found in almost every codebase, but sustaining those open source projects and communities over the long-term can be a challenge. Much of the critical infrastructure that we all rely on is made up of open source projects that lack the resources to be properly maintained over the long term. Companies, public institutions, and philanthropic organizations are beginning to fill this gap, but measuring the impact of this funding is an ongoing challenge, and we need to be able to understand the impacts to justify future rounds of funding as well as to optimize funding approaches whilst mitigating ineffective or even harmful approaches.

In this panel, we’ll talk about what we’ve learned from public funding programs in Europe and corporate FOSS funds along with measuring the impact of those funding initiatives. We’ll discuss the challenges of understanding how funding can have positive or negative impacts for open source projects with different characteristics. The audience will gain an appreciation for funding initiatives for open source projects and how to understand and maximize the impact of those initiatives.