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

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

and related open-source software 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,

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, enterprise ...

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 Power ISA is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) currently developed by the OpenPOWER Foundation, led by IBM. It was originally developed by IBM and the now-defunct Power.org industry group. Power IS ...

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

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage ...

* 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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

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