?
Thats a pretty negative/limited view.
Tons of open source projects could benefit from additional roles/resources aside from programmers: project management, graphic design, UI/UX, technical writing, QA engineering.
Additionally, longer-term funding for the main contributors to a project might allow them to elevate a project's status beyond a nights-and-weekends hobby, with likely improvements for code quality/overall quality.
The vast majority of the kernel code is a massive number of drivers and subsystems that can be worked on independendly.
A better funded Linux Foundation could also invest in better tooling (better compilers, better test rigs), and in research on speculative improvements to pretty much every subsystem.
> But on that note, I never understood why they track the drivers in the same git repo as the kernel.
Because the advantage of Linux drivers is code sharing, cooperation between different companies include competeting one, hierarchy of maintainers and developers. No driver code can be merged into upstream driver until subsystem maintainer, Linus and planty other developers see it.
So companies that maintain drivers in same subsystem improve and fix each others code. They also can't just merge some mess into upstream and have to follow certain rules that benefit kernel as whole. E.g for instance at least in GPU drivers it's not allowed to add any code upstream if it's only used by proprietary components in userspace.
> They should just develop a stable kernel API for drivers, and have extract the drivers out and track them separately from kernel development.
I can't imagine how much great software KDE could produce with another 50k, let alone 500k, in corporate sponsorship. It has fewer developers with a broader reach than Gnome and an even older legacy.
Just a really easy example is how they now have the Kirigami UI framework, and they released their software store redone in it a few months back (Discover) but the man hours and work required to port more of the collection to that toolkit would be immense. And even Discover is missing a lot of polish since its primarily a demo product at this point.
Throw another 10 developers in there (at 50k a pop?), and all those complaints about "it looks like Windows" with toolbars and dropdowns would be abated.
So not much, unless the work they have to do is highly parallelizable (i.e. can be broken up), and would truly benefit from more developers.
I can imagine KDE benefiting from this, because KDE is an umbrella organization with hundreds (if not thousands) of projects underneath it.