Google LLC has been a member of the Linux Foundation for quite some time, but only at the lower level, holding a silver membership since it first signed up. That changed today as the internet revealed that it’s upping its membership status to the highest-tier Platinum level, giving it much greater influence in the future direction of the leading open-source software organization.

Google’s commitment comes at a price. The company will have to fork out $500,000 a year to maintain its Platinum status, compared with the $100,000 a year it was paying for its Silver sponsorship.

Still, Google gets a lot more for its money, as its head of open source strategy for Google Cloud Platform, Sarah Novotny, will take a seat on the Linux Foundation’s board of directors, giving it much better representation. “She will be a tremendous asset,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

One has to wonder why Google didn’t make this move much earlier. It is after all, one of the biggest creators and proponents of open-source software in the world, contributing to hundreds of important projects, including some of the major ones such as Kubernetes, the container orchestration manager.

“Google’s contributions to the open-source world have been diverse, substantial, and influential on many levels,” said James Kobielus, lead analyst at SiliconANGLE sister company Wikibon. “It has also been quite active within the Linux Foundation in projects that align with its core focus areas in artificial intelligence, cloud-native computing, and progressive browser applications.”

Kobielus said that he hopes that as a Platinum sponsor, Google will now transition TensorFlow and TensorFlow.js to the Linux Foundation and advocate for bringing them into greater alignment with the Linux Foundation’s Acumos AI project. “This will be essential to encourage the open sharing, reuse and deployment of AI apps built in TensorFlow and other deep-learning frameworks all the way out to edge applications,” he said.

Google is also one of the biggest users of open-source software itself. Its Android platform for smartphones runs on the Linux kernel, for example. Without Linux and open-source software, Google would surely be a far different company than what it is today.

“Open source is an essential part of Google’s culture, and we’ve long recognized the potential of open ecosystems to grow quickly, be more resilient and adaptable in the face of change, and create better software,” Novotny said.

Embracing ‘open clouds’

In a separate blog post, Google hinted at what it’s hoping to achieve by stepping up its involvement with Linux, promoting a concept it calls “open clouds.” That concept encompasses a number of things, the company said, most important the ability to pick up an application and move it across on-premises infrastructures, Google’s cloud or other clouds, at any time. Open clouds are also linked to the idea of open application programming interfaces, which allow people to build on other’s work, the company said.

“Open clouds matter more now than ever,” company executives said in the blog post. “While most companies today use a single public cloud provider in addition to their on-premises environment, research shows that most companies will likely adopt multiple public and private clouds in the coming years.”

Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE it was good to see Google increasing its commitment to open-source. However, he noted that sponsorship is not enough by itself, and that he’ll be looking for Google to step up its own contributions to Linux-backed projects as well.

“That is something that Google has been doing, so it will be interesting to see if things change going forward, or if we just get more broader support from Google for Linux,” Mueller said.

Google is one of more than 800 organizations that hold Linux Foundation membership. Other notable Platinum sponsors include AT&T Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., IBM Corp., Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp., Qualcomm Technologies Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and VMware Inc.

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