The

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Linux Technology Center (LTC) is an organization focused on development for the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

and related

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

projects. In 1999, IBM created the LTC to combine its software developers interested in Linux and other open-source software into a single organization. Much of the LTC's early effort was focused on making "all of its server platforms Linux friendly." The LTC collaborated with the Linux community to make Linux run optimally on processor architectures such as

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

, and Power ISA. In recent years, the focus of the LTC has expanded to include several other open source initiatives. With about 185 IBM employees working for the LTC in 1999, this number grew steadily to about 600 in 2006, 300 of whom worked full-time on Linux. In December 2000, IBM claimed to have invested approximately one billion US dollars in Linux by the year 2000, and to currently have about 1,500 developers working on the alternative operating system. It announced that it would invest a similar amount in 2001 and also build the largest Linux-based supercomputer for Royal Dutch/Shell Oil. While most of the money was invested in Linux development, some of it went into others, mainly AIX. The following year, senior vice president Bill Zeitler claimed to have recouped most of this spending in the first year through the sale of software and systems.Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: IBM and Linux – What’s really happening, https://www.linux.com/news/ibm-and-linux-whats-really-happening/

Details

Developers in the LTC contribute to various open-source projects such as: *

Kernel-based Virtual Machine Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a free and open-source virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the Kernel (operating system), kernel to function as a hypervisor. It was merged into the Mainline Linux, mainline Linux kernel i ...

(KVM) on x86 and Power systems, including Kimchi *

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. It provides a software framework for distributed storage and processing of big data using the MapReduce programming model. Hadoop wa ...

* OpenStack * OpenPOWER Foundation * GNU toolchain *

Open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

standards LTC is a worldwide team with main locations in Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Israel, and the United States.

References

External links

* * Joe Barr, 2001
Inside IBM's Linux Technology Center
IBM Linux organizations {{Linux-stub