$500k is almost the entire budget of the FreeBSD Foundation. I don't know what the Linux Foundation spends money on, but the FreeBSD Foundation does great stuff with its money.
And if you happen to have a "paltry" $500k sitting around, feel free to send it in FreeBSD's direction. :-)
The kernel is just a small part of the software on a phone, of corse, and likely not the crucial differentiator either. Don't forget that Samsung probably uses Linux in a lot of other products too, e.g. TVs.
Yeah, it doesn't sound like a lot, but in terms of what the Linux Foundation actually does I think it's fairly significant. It is the price that the Linux Foundation has set for a platinum membership. If they needed more money, they could have priced it higher.
Other than Linus, the linux foundation doesn't really pay developers. They are just an advisory and steering board, doing a bit of marketing. Samsung contributes much more directly by actually paying for Tizen OS development.
Well, they're more serious than Red Hat (Silver member), SUSE (Gold member) and Google (Gold member though currently doubled via Motorola). How much more serious do you want?
To be fair, that's "serious support of the Linux Foundation", not "serious support of Linux". As I'm sure you're aware, all three of those companies contribute vastly more to the open source community than their mere support of LF.
LF pays for Linus and GregKH, and I'm sure a lot of other good work. It's hardly all of "Linux".
