Dated as this information is, it paints an interesting picture of the state of non-profits across the community. As a whole, revenue seemed to be on the rise for these organizations and most of them seem to be in good fiscal health, even if they lost cash this year. Combined, the 18 organizations grew just shy of $6 million in assets during their respective fiscal periods.

Another telling piece of information that was obtained from the Form 990s was the "public support" percentage. "Public support," in this context, is the percentage of total revenue that comes in portions that are less than 2 percent of total revenue for the past five years. (The IRS's assumption being that any donation more than 2 percent could skew an organization's non-profit status.)

This percentage does not have to be reported for any organization that hasn't filed five years' worth of returns, nor does it to apply to business trade foundations, such as the Linux Foundation, or private foundations like the Linux Kernel Organization, which gets 100% funding from Google. But for those organizations that reported the public support figure, the Linux Expo of Southern California, Inc. group (which organizes SCALE and the Texas LinuxFest) came in the highest at a 99.68 percent public support figure. The Mozilla Foundation ranked the lowest, with a mere 14.71 percent public support figure--presumably because of the funds coming in from the Mozilla Corporation.

Most of the other non-profits on this list had public support figures in the 80-90 percentage range, with one surprising exception: a 45.3 percent figure at the Software Freedom Conservancy. At least 33.3 percent of funds must come from public support to qualify without exception to be a non-profit, so the SFC is in no danger there. Mozilla, though, has to explicitly state why it deserves to keep its non-profit status under a facts-and-circumstances test, which it does at length in its Form 990.

While this report is meant to be comprehensive, there are some notable omissions of organizations that are active in the FLOSS community. Both the LibreOffice Foundation and the KDE e.V. are based in Germany, and are not subject to U.S. IRS reporting (not to mention the LibreOffice Foundation is still too new to file anything anyway). The Eclipse Foundation, which is based in Canada, is absent for similar reasons.