High tech lab for open source development
Hewlett-Packard, Intel Corporation, IBM and NEC Corporation had announced the Open Source Development Lab, the industry's first independent, non-profit lab for developers who are adding enterprise capabilities to Linux. The four companies plan to provide significant equipment and funding to the lab over the next several years. Additional contributors and sponsors of the lab include Caldera, Dell, Linuxcare, LynuxWorks, Red Hat, SGI, SuSE, TurboLinux and VA Linux.
The lab, currently under formation, will provide open source developers with a centralized enterprise development environment for sharing development ideas and innovations. The lab will be based near Portland, Ore. It is expected to open at the end of the year.
"The Open Source Development Lab will help fulfill a need that individual Linux and open source developers often have -- access to high-end enterprise hardware," said Brian Behlendorf, chief technical officer of CollabNet and co-founder of Apache. "It's great that these companies are coming together to help accelerate development for this environment."
Supporting the Open Source Development Model
The lab will support existing industry projects that use open source licenses and are established according to today's open source development model. The lab will not create new projects; instead, it will help accelerate existing or new projects developed by the open source community.
The initial lab projects will be announced later in the year after an open, neutral process for choosing projects is coordinated with the open source community. Initial projects are expected to range from tools development to kernel projects that advance the enterprise capabilities of Linux.
Independent Board to Govern Lab
The lab will be governed by an independent board and management structure, and will consist of members from the open source community as well as representatives of sponsor companies. An independent executive director employed by the lab will implement policy, make funding decisions and work with the open source community to select projects.