AlmaLinux revenue: $250,051 in 2025, and 70% of it went on advertising

Quick answer (October 2026). The AlmaLinux OS Foundation reported total revenue of $250,051 for its 2025 financial year, against $247,970 of expenses and a surplus of $2,081. The four filed years run $101,247 (2022), $228,297 (2023), $327,579 (2024) and $250,051 (2025). All but $46 of that 2025 income was membership dues; the remaining $46 was a gain on sales of assets. The Foundation reported zero employees, zero salaries and 143 volunteers. Its largest single cost was advertising and promotion at $174,758, or 70.48% of everything it spent.

The widely syndicated figure of $2.9 million is wrong by a factor of 11.60.

AlmaLinux is one of the operating systems that quietly replaced CentOS in enterprise server rooms after Red Hat changed the CentOS model in December 2020. It runs inside Cisco's Unified Communications Manager, Arista's EOS network operating system, N-able's RMM platform and Alert Logic's security appliance, all of which the Foundation lists publicly on its own foundation page. You would reasonably assume the organisation behind it is a substantial operation.

It is not. It is a volunteer body that spent less last year than a single senior engineer costs, and most of what it did spend went on being seen.

The four filed years

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is a United States 501(c)(6) business league, EIN 86-2791864, registered in Estero, Florida. It has filed four federal returns. All four are public, and all four are reproduced below from the filed XML rather than from any intermediary.

Across four years the Foundation has taken in $907,174 and spent $651,864.

The 2025 return was signed on January 24, 2026 and received by the IRS on February 15, 2026. There is no 2026 filing: a search of the IRS index for receipt year 2027 returns zero rows for this EIN. That makes the 2025 figures above the most recent statement of AlmaLinux's finances that exists anywhere.

Two things stand out immediately. Revenue fell 23.67% in 2025 while expenses rose 39.30%, which took a $149,562 surplus down to $2,081. And the 2022 column carries negative net assets, which is worth coming back to.

All of the money is membership dues, and that is not what the summaries say

On the 2025 return, Part VIII line 1b (headed "Membership dues" on the IRS form) reports $250,005. Total contributions on the same return are $250,005. The two figures are identical, to the dollar, in all three full returns:

This matters because of how Form 990 is laid out. Lines 1a through 1f all roll up into line 1h, so dues land inside the contributions block. Every downstream summary therefore shows this organisation with contributions at 100.0% of revenue, when it receives no donations at all in the ordinary sense. It is funded by companies paying an annual membership fee and receiving logo placement and a weighted vote in return.

The filer is not doing anything wrong here. Line 1b is where dues belong. The defect is in the reading, not the filing.

The clearest illustration is the 2022 column. On Form 990-EZ, dues sit on line 3, "Membership dues and assessments", which is a different line from line 1, "Contributions, gifts, grants, and similar amounts received". So the 2022 return shows contributions of $0 and dues of $100,562. Same organisation, same money, same sponsors. The reported "contributions" went from $0 to 100% of revenue because the Foundation outgrew the short form, not because anything about its funding changed.

What the money actually buys

This is the part that is published nowhere. Form 990 Part IX breaks functional expenses into named lines, and AlmaLinux's breakdown is unusual enough to be worth setting out in full.

Each of those four columns foots exactly to the declared total. The 2022 column is reconstructed from the Foundation's own Schedule O breakdown of its "other expenses" line, which itself sums to the declared $49,947 before the $24,158 of independent contractor fees is added.

As a share of everything spent:

The advertising share has risen in every single filed year, from 44.69% to 70.48%. In 2025, advertising and travel together accounted for 95.28% of all spending. Information technology, for an organisation whose entire output is an operating system, was 2.56%.

The 2025 movement is the sharpest. Advertising rose 56.63% year on year while IT fell 43.99%, in the same twelve months that revenue fell.

Before reading that as waste, it is worth being clear about what it almost certainly means. The Foundation does not pay anyone to build AlmaLinux. The engineering is done by employees of member companies and by the 143 volunteers the return counts. Build and mirror infrastructure is donated in kind by sponsors such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Fastly and the OSU Open Source Lab, all of which appear on the Foundation's sponsor roster. What is left for the Foundation's own cash to buy is conferences, booths, events, swag and travel to all of it. On that reading "advertising and promotion" is not marketing overhead layered on top of the work. It is very nearly the whole of what this particular legal entity does with money, because everything else arrives for free.

That is a genuinely different picture of an open source foundation from the one most readers carry around, and it is sitting in a public document that nobody reads.

The loan that kept it alive

The 2022 return shows total liabilities of $102,066 against total assets of $99,959, which is why net assets are negative in both the opening and closing columns of that year: -$29,249 at the start and -$2,107 at the end.

The Foundation's Schedule O for 2022 names the liability without ambiguity. Against Form 990-EZ Part II line 26, it reads:

Schedule O, 2022 return, verbatim: LOAN FROM CLOUD LINUX INC 102066. 102066.

CloudLinux Inc. is the company that launched AlmaLinux in 2021 after Red Hat's CentOS announcement, and it remains a Platinum sponsor today. Its chief executive, Igor Seletskiy, is the person listed as President on all four of the Foundation's returns and the officer who signed them. The 2023 and 2024 returns carry a Schedule L, the schedule for transactions with interested persons, recording the same loan with the relationship given as MEMBER, the purpose as CASH FLOW, an original principal of $102,066, board approval yes and a written agreement yes. The counterparty name is truncated to "LOAN FROM CLOUD LINU" in both, which is why the 2022 Schedule O entry matters: it is the only place the full name appears.

The repayment schedule is not disclosed anywhere. It can be derived exactly. Form 990 does not require a cash flow statement, but AlmaLinux files on the cash basis and its entire balance sheet is a single line of non-interest-bearing cash, so the movement in that one line must equal the surplus plus any financing:

The two unexplained amounts are $50,000 and $52,066. They sum to $102,066, exactly the original principal, and they match the liability balance falling from $102,066 to $52,066 to zero. So the Foundation repaid $50,000 in 2023 and the remaining $52,066 in 2024, and by the end of 2024 it owed nothing. The 2025 reconciliation closes to the dollar with no financing line at all.

No interest expense appears on any of the four returns. Each year's expense block foots exactly to its declared total without one.

Two points of fairness are owed here, and they should come before any inference.

First, this is exactly what the Foundation's own constitution contemplates. Its bylaws, Article X, Section 10.1, "Transactions with Interested Parties", permit such a transaction where the material facts are disclosed and it is authorised by "the affirmative votes of a majority of the disinterested Directors", or where the transaction is fair to the Foundation. Schedule L records board approval and a written agreement. The loan was disclosed, approved, documented, interest-free and repaid in full. Nothing in any of these documents suggests anything improper, and this piece does not assert otherwise.

Second, the 2025 return answers "No" to Part VI line 12a, "Did the organization have a written conflict of interest policy?", as do the 2023 and 2024 returns. Yet the Foundation publishes a board operations and code of ethics document adopted on January 10, 2023, and its foundation page states that conflicts of interest are disclosed and interested transactions require approval by disinterested directors. The published bylaws never use the phrase "conflict of interest" but do contain the interested-party provisions above. The most likely reading is that the Foundation has the substance under a different name and answered the question narrowly. On this point the return understates its own governance rather than overstating it.

The sponsor roster does not reconcile to the revenue line

AlmaLinux publishes both its membership prices and its sponsor list. The six tiers are Individual (free), Mirror (in kind), Silver ($2,500 a year), Ruby ($5,000), Gold ($20,000) and Platinum ($100,000). As of October 2026 the published roster carries 3 Platinum sponsors, 9 Gold, 2 Ruby and 15 Silver.

That is 2.11 times the $250,051 the Foundation actually reported, a gap of $277,449.

This is a measurement, not an accusation, and there are at least four ordinary explanations that need stating. The roster is today's and the revenue is 2025's, so sponsors may have joined in between. Published list prices are not necessarily what every member pays, and a roster entry does not establish what that member was invoiced. And most importantly, a great deal of sponsorship at this kind of foundation arrives in kind: cloud credits, mirror capacity, build infrastructure and bandwidth, none of which is reportable as revenue on a Form 990 the way a cash payment is.

If that last explanation is the main one, and the Mirror tier being explicitly "in kind" suggests it is, then the honest conclusion is the interesting one: the Form 990 materially understates what AlmaLinux actually runs on. The cash line captures the conference budget. The infrastructure never touches it.

One related figure is worth recording without interpretation. The returns answer "No" to whether a Schedule B of substantial contributors was required, in all three full-990 years. A Schedule B is generally triggered by a contributor at $5,000 or more, and the published Gold and Platinum tiers sit well above that. The returns say what they say; nothing in the public record resolves the two, and this piece does not attempt to.

Nobody is paid anything

Across 2023, 2024 and 2025 the Foundation reports:

• Total employees: 0
• Salaries, other compensation and employee benefits: $0
• Professional fundraising fees: $0
• W-2 forms issued: 0
• Volunteers: 143

Part VII lists nine people in the 2025 return, a President and eight directors, and every one of them is recorded at $0 from the organisation, $0 from related organisations and $0 of other compensation. The return ticks the box for no listed person receiving compensation. There is no Schedule J in any year, because the $150,000 threshold that would trigger one is never remotely approached.

The only professional services the Foundation buys are $1,000 of accounting in each of the three full-return years, and $6,342 of legal fees in 2023 and nothing since.

Some texture from the filings themselves

A few details that say something about how small this operation is.

The mission statement contains a typo, and has since 2022. All four returns describe the purpose as developing and maintaining "ALMALINUS OS". It appears three times in each of the three full returns, in the activity description, the mission description and the program service description, and once on the shorter 2022 form. The Foundation's own bylaws spell it "AlmaLinux OS", so this is a filing error rather than an organisational one, repeated across four years and never caught.

The returns say the organisation has no website. The 2022 Form 990-EZ gives the website as almalinux.org. The 2023, 2024 and 2025 returns all give it as "N/A", while Schedule O in the same returns says a link is available on the website.

Two numbers never move. Voting members of the governing body is reported as 371 in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and volunteers as 143 in all three. Neither changes by a single unit across three years.

That 371 is itself worth explaining, because it looks absurd next to a nine-person list of officers and directors. Part VI line 1a asks for the number of voting members of the governing body, and the Foundation's answer to line 6 ("members or stockholders") is "MEMBERS". AlmaLinux membership is open: an Individual Member pays nothing and gets one vote per election. So the 371 is almost certainly the membership, not a board. Both readings are available and the return does not say which is meant.

Votes are weighted by money, and the Foundation says so. Under the bylaws adopted in April 2026, all six membership classes vote together with votes weighted Platinum 50, Gold 15, Ruby 5, Silver 5, and Individual and Mirror members 1 each. The 29 sponsor members therefore carry 370 weighted votes between them. This sits alongside a genuine structural protection the foundation page states plainly: no single employer may hold more than one voting board seat, regardless of how much it sponsors. Both facts are published, and they pull in different directions.

Delaware or Florida. The published bylaws state the Foundation "is organized and shall be operated as a non-stock membership corporation operating not for profit under the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware". The 2025 return reports its state of legal domicile as FL. The bylaws on the site are the April 2026 amended version, so whether this is a discrepancy or a change cannot be settled from the public record, and it is recorded here as a measurement rather than a finding.

What the Foundation says about its own governance

It is worth recording that AlmaLinux has been unusually candid about the one area where it got into difficulty. In a post dated June 10, 2026, board chair benny Vasquez wrote that the Foundation cancelled an election in progress the previous September "because we found inconsistencies in how our own processes, bylaws, and committee guidelines fit together", and then rewrote the bylaws, the election process and the election calendar to fix it.

That post also explains why the board on the website does not match the board on the 2025 return: Jun Yoshida and Jesse Asklund, both listed as directors in the return, have since stepped down, and their Cohort A seats were the subject of the 2026 election. The difference is a timing artefact, not a contradiction.

What everyone else says AlmaLinux earns

Search for this and the first result is a GetLatka comparison page, last updated August 10, 2026, which states that AlmaLinux generates $2.9M in revenue with a team size of 26, and files it under the category "File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Software".

Against the filed 2025 return:

The $2.9 million figure overstates the Foundation's actual income by $2,649,949. The headcount of 26 is stated against a return reporting zero employees and zero W-2 forms issued. GetLatka's own prose description of AlmaLinux, as a community owned and governed forever-free enterprise Linux distribution, is accurate; the categorisation and the numbers are not.

The Wikipedia article on AlmaLinux contains zero occurrences of the word "revenue". That is not a criticism. It makes no financial claim at all, which on this evidence is a more defensible position than making one.

Nothing else on the first page of results answers the question. Two of the nine organic results are earnings releases from Tenable Holdings, an unrelated listed company.

How to check all of this yourself

Everything above comes from two places, both free and neither requiring an account.

The Foundation's ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer record carries the extracted figures for all four years. Note that its API is roughly two years behind its own web page, so the page is the thing to read.

The filed XML itself is better, because it contains the schedules. The IRS publishes annual index files and archives; find the EIN in the index for the receipt year, take the object ID, and pull that member out of the matching archive. The four filings used here are object IDs 202430589349200503 (2022), 202420579349300712 (2023), 202520649349301122 (2024) and 202600469349300000 (2025).

Line labels quoted in this piece were checked against the IRS Form 990 itself rather than from memory.

The short version

AlmaLinux ships an enterprise operating system that Cisco, Arista and N-able put their names on. The legal entity behind it took in a quarter of a million dollars last year, employs nobody, paid nobody, was carried through its first two years by an interest-free loan from the company that founded it, and spends roughly seven dollars in ten on being visible.

None of that is a scandal. It is simply a much stranger and much smaller organisation than the number circulating about it suggests, and the real figure has been sitting in a public filing since February 2026.