The news is that TLF spent just 3.2% of its funds on the Linux kernel. It dwindled from a paltry 3.4% in the previous year. Meanwhile, Linux developers are giving up on their LTS kernel due to lack of resources.
That news had many defending the foundation, saying that their other projects get equally low funding. However, it makes me wonder how these foundations would fare in terms of income if they didn't use the name of a popular open source project. It's likely that a lot of donors have the misconception that their money goes to the namesake project - this is especially true for Mozilla.
The LTS kernel change appears to be lack of senior maintainer bandwidth.
This is not, in my experience, the sort of problem that could be solved by throwing money at it.
(and by "in my experience" I mean situations where I was involved with that shape of problem, and could have arranged to have money thrown at it, and the eventual decision was that that wasn't the limiting factor)
Note that this is entirely separate to the question of whether what TLF is doing with its money is suboptimal - it probably is - but I don't believe from what I've seen that the LTS kernel situation is downstream of funding decisions.
That news had many defending the foundation, saying that their other projects get equally low funding. However, it makes me wonder how these foundations would fare in terms of income if they didn't use the name of a popular open source project. It's likely that a lot of donors have the misconception that their money goes to the namesake project - this is especially true for Mozilla.