Linux Foundation

Introduced in October 2017,[13] the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) is a legal framework for sharing data.[14] There are two initial CDLA licenses:

• The CDLA-Sharing license was designed to embody the principles of copyleft in a data license. It puts terms in place to ensure that downstream recipients can use and modify that data, and are also required to share their changes to the data.
• The CDLA-Permissive agreement is similar to permissive open source licenses in that the publisher of data allows anyone to use, modify and do what they want with the data with no obligations to share changes or modifications.

On March 3, 2009, the Linux Foundation announced that they would take over the management of Linux.com from its previous owners, SourceForge, Inc.[15]

The site was relaunched on May 13, 2009, shifting away from its previous incarnation as a news site to become a central source for Linux tutorials, information, software, documentation and answers across the server, desktop/netbook, mobile, and embedded areas. It also includes a directory of Linux software and hardware.[16]

Much like Linux itself, Linux.com plans to rely on the community to create and drive the content and conversation.

In 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the Linux Foundation announced the LFPH,[17] a program dedicated to advancing and supporting the virus contact tracing work led by Google and Apple and their Bluetooth notification systems. The LFPH is focusing its efforts on public health applications, including the effort's first initiative: a notification app intended for governments wanting to launch their privacy-focused exposure notification networks. As of today, LFPH hosts two contact-tracing apps.[18]

In September 2020, The Linux Foundation announced the LF Climate Finance Foundation (LFCF), a new initiative "to encourage investment in AI-enhanced open source analytics to address climate change."[19] LFCF plans to build a platform that will utilize open-source open data to help the financial investment, NGO, and academia sectors to help better model companies’ exposure to climate change.[20] Allianz, Amazon, Microsoft, and S&P Global will be the initiative's founding members.[21]

LF Energy is an initiative launched by the Linux Foundation in 2018 to improve the power grid.[22][23]

The Linux Foundation Training Program features instructors and content from the leaders of the Linux developer and open source communities.[24]

Participants receive Linux training that is vendor-neutral and created with oversight from leaders of the Linux development community. The Linux Foundation's online and in-person training programs aim to deliver broad, foundational knowledge and networking opportunities.

In March 2014, the Linux Foundation and edX partnered to offer a free massive open online class titled Introduction to Linux.[25] This was the first in a series of ongoing free offerings from both organizations whose current catalogue of MOOCs include Intro to DevOps, Intro to Cloud Foundry and Cloud Native Software Architecture, Intro to Apache Hadoop, Intro to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies, and Intro to OpenStack.[26]

In December 2015, the Linux Foundation introduced a self-paced course designed to help prepare administrators for the OpenStack Foundation's Certified OpenStack Administrator exam.[27]

As part of a partnership with Microsoft, it was announced in December 2015 that the Linux on Azure certification would be awarded to individuals who pass both the Microsoft Exam 70-533 (Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions) and the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) exam.[28]

In early 2017, at the annual Open Source Leadership Summit, it was announced that the Linux Foundation would begin offering an Inclusive Speaker Orientation course in partnership with the National Center for Women & Information Technology. The free course is designed to give participants "practical skills to promote inclusivity in their presentations."[29]

In September 2020, the Linux Foundation released a free serverless computing training course with CNCF. It is taught by Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS.[30]

Among many other organization with similar offerings, The Linux Foundation has reported a 40% increase in demand for their online courses in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting social-distancing measures.[31]

The patent commons consists of all patented software which has been made available to the open source community. For software to be considered to be in the commons the patent owner must guarantee that developers will not be sued for infringement, though there may be some restrictions on the use of the patented code. The concept was first given substance by Red Hat in 2001 when it published its Patent Promise.[32]

The Patent Commons Project was launched on November 15, 2005, by the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). The core of the project is an online patent commons reference library aggregating and documenting information about patent-related pledges and other legal solutions directed at the open-source software community. As of 2015, the project listed 53 patents.[33]

ACRN is a flexible, lightweight reference hypervisor, built with real-time and safety-criticality in mind, optimized to streamline embedded development through an open source platform.

AllJoyn[36] is an open source application framework for connected devices and services was formed under Allseen Alliance in 2013. The project is now sponsored as an independent Linux Foundation project by the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF).

Automotive Grade Linux

Developer(s)	Linux Foundation
Repository	git.automotivelinux.org
Type	Unix-like operating system
Website	www.automotivelinux.org

Automotive Grade Linux[37] (AGL) is a collaborative open source project developing a Linux-based, open platform for the connected car that can serve as the de facto standard for the industry. Although initially focused on In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI), the AGL roadmap includes instrument cluster, heads up display, telematics and autonomous driving.[38] The goals of AGL are to provide:

• An automotive-focused core Linux operating system stack that meets common and shared requirements of the automotive ecosystem
• A transparent, collaborative and open environment for Automotive OEMs, Tier One suppliers, and their semiconductor and software vendors to create in-vehicle software
• A collective voice for working with other open source projects and developing new open source solutions
• An embedded Linux distribution that enables rapid prototyping for developers new to Linux or teams with prior open source experience[39]

On June 30, 2014, AGL announced their first release, which was based on Tizen IVI and was primarily for demo applications.[40] AGL expanded the first reference platform with the Unified Code Base (UCB) distribution.[41] The first UCB release, nicknamed Agile Albacore, was released in January 2016 and leverages software components from AGL, Tizen and GENIVI Alliance, now called COVESA (Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance). UCB 2.0, nicknamed Brilliant Blowfish, was made available in July 2016 and included new features like rear seat display, video playback, audio routing and application framework.[42] UCB 3.0, or Charming Chinook[43] was released in January 2017. AGL plans to support additional use cases such as instrument clusters and telematics systems.

The "CGL" Workgroup's main purpose is to "interface with network equipment providers and carriers to gather requirements and produce specifications that Linux distribution vendors can implement."[44] It also serves to use unimplemented requirements to foster development projects that will assist in the upstream integration of these requirements.

The Continuous Delivery Foundation[45] serves as the vendor-neutral home of many of the fastest-growing projects for continuous delivery, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. It supports DevOps practitioners with an open model, training, industry guidelines, and a portability focus.

Cloud Foundry[46] is an open source, multi cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization. In January 2015, the Cloud Foundry Foundation was created as an independent not-for-profit Linux Foundation Project. The foundation exists to increase awareness and adoption of Cloud Foundry, grow the contributor community, and create a cohesive strategy across all member companies. The Foundation serves as a neutral party holding all Cloud Foundry intellectual property.

CloudNativeDay 2016

Founded in 2015, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation[47] (CNCF) exists to help advance container technology[48] and align the tech industry around its evolution. It was announced with Kubernetes 1.0, an open source container cluster manager, which was contributed to the foundation by Google as a seed technology. Today, CNCF is backed by over 450 sponsors. Founding members include Google, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Twitter, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Docker, Univa, and VMware.[49][50]

The Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project[51] was announced at the 2017 Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles.[52] Overall, the project aims to provide transparency and health and security metrics for open-source projects.[53]

Code Aurora Forum[54] is a consortium of companies with projects serving the mobile wireless industry. Software projects it concerns itself with are e.g. Android for MSM, Femto Linux Project, LLVM, MSM WLAN and Linux-MSM.

Started in 2003, the Core Embedded Linux Project[55] aims to provide a vendor-neutral place to establish core embedded Linux technologies beyond those of the Linux Foundation's Projects. From the start, any Linux Foundation member company has been allowed to apply for membership in the Core Embedded Linux Project.

The Core Infrastructure Initiative[56] was announced on 25 April 2014 in the wake of Heartbleed to fund and support free and open-source software projects that are critical to the functioning of the Internet.

Delta Lake[57] is an open-source storage layer that brings ACID transactions to Apache Spark™ and big data workloads.

The DiaMon Workgroup works toward improving interoperability between open source tools and improve Linux-based tracing, profiling, logging, and monitoring features. According to the workgroup, DiaMon "aims to accelerate this development by making it easier to work together on common pieces."[58]

The Data Plane Development Kit[59] consists of libraries to accelerate CPU architecture-running packet processing workloads. According to Intel, "DPDK can improve packet processing performance by up to ten times."[60]

Started in 2014, Dronecode[61] began as an open source, collaborative project to unite current and future open source drone initiatives under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. The goal is a common, shared open source stack for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Chris Anderson (CEO of 3D Robotics & founder of DIY Drones) serves as the chairman of the board of directors. Lorenz Meier, creator of PX4, MAVLink, QGC, and Pixhawk serves as the community representative on the Board.

Founded in 2017, EdgeX Foundry acts as a vendor-neutral interoperability framework. It is hosted in a hardware and OS agnostic reference platform and seeks to enable an ecosystem of plug-and-play components, uniting the marketplace and accelerating IoT deployment. The project wants to enable collaborators to freely work on open and interoperable IoT solutions with existing and self-created connectivity standards.

The ELISA (Enabling Linux In Safety Applications) project was started to make it easier for companies to build and certify Linux kernel-based safety-critical applications – systems whose failure could result in loss of human life, significant property damage or environmental damage. ELISA members are working together to define and maintain a common set of tools and processes that can help companies demonstrate that a Linux-based system meets the necessary safety requirements for certification.[62]

ELISA was launched in 2019 and builds upon work done by SIL2LinuxMP and Real-Time Linux projects.[63]

The Fast Data Project-referred to as "Fido"- provides an IO services framework for the next wave of network and storage software. In the stack, FD.io is the universal data plane. "FD.io runs completely in the user space," said Ed Warnicke[64] (consulting engineer with Cisco and chair of the FD.io technical steering committee).

The FinOps Foundation supports practitioners of FinOps, a discipline that helps finance and IT operations teams to work together to manage public cloud spending collaboratively, to get the maximum value out of cloud investments in a way that aligns to organizational goals. FinOps principles, best practices and framework allow for more accountability and predictability to the highly variable, self-service, consumption based billing models of public cloud.[65][66]

FOSSology is primarily a project dedicated to an open source license compliance software system and toolkit. Users are able to run license, copyright and export control scans from the command line. A database and web UI provide a compliance workflow.[67]

FRRouting (FRR)[68] is an IP routing protocol suite for Unix and Linux platforms. It incorporates protocol daemons for BGP, IS-IS, LDP, OSPF, PIM, and RIP.

On 7 November 2018, the GraphQL project was moved from Facebook to the newly established GraphQL Foundation, hosted by the non-profit Linux Foundation.[69][70]

The Hyperledger project is a global, open source effort based around advancing cross-industry blockchain technologies. In addition to being hosted by the Linux Foundation, it is backed by finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology leaders.[71] The project is the foundation's fastest growing to date,[72] boasting over 115 members since founding in 2016. In May 2016, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, Brian Behlendorf, joined the project as its executive director.

IO Visor is an open source project and community of developers that will enable a new way to innovate, develop and share IO and networking functions. It will advance IO and networking technologies to address new requirements presented by cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV).

IoTivity is an OSS framework enabling seamless device-to-device connectivity to aid the Internet of Things as it grows. While Allseen Alliance and Open Connectivity Foundation merged in October 2016, the IoT projects of each (AllJoyn and IoTivity, respectively) will continue operating under The Linux Foundation. The two projects will "collaborate to support future versions of the OCF specification with a single IoTivity implementation."[73]

JanusGraph aims to continue open source development of the TitanDB graph database. It is a fork TitanDB, "the distributed graph database that was originally released in 2012 to enable users to find connections among large data sets composed of billions of vertices and edges."[74]

JS Foundation existed from 2016 to 2019.[75] It was created in 2016 when the Dojo Foundation merged with jQuery Foundation, which merged subsequently rebranded itself as JS Foundation and became a Linux Foundation project.[76][77][78] In 2019, the JS Foundation merged with the Node.js Foundation to form the new OpenJS Foundation[79][80] with a stated mission to foster healthy growth of the JavaScript and web ecosystem as a whole.[81]

The Kinetic Open Storage Project is dedicated to creating an open source standard around Ethernet-enabled, key/value Kinetic devices for accessing their drives. By creating this standard, it expands the available ecosystem of software, hardware, and systems developers. The project is the result of an alliance including major hard drive manufacturers - Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital - in addition to Cisco, Cleversafe, Dell, DigitalSense, NetApp, Open vStorage, Red Hat and Scality.[82]

The Linux Standard Base, or LSB, is a joint project by several Linux distributions under the organizational structure of the Linux Foundation to standardize the software system structure, or filesystem hierarchy, used with Linux operating system. The LSB is based on the POSIX specification, the Single UNIX Specification, and several other open standards, but extends them in certain areas.

According to the LSB:

The goal of the LSB is to develop and promote a set of open standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable software applications to run on any compliant system even in binary form. In addition, the LSB will help coordinate efforts to recruit software vendors to port and write products for Linux Operating System.

The LSB compliance may be certified for a product by a certification procedure.[83]

The LSB specifies for example: standard libraries, a number of commands and utilities that extend the POSIX standard, the layout of the file system hierarchy, run levels, the printing system, including spoolers such as CUPS and tools like Foomatic and several extensions to the X Window System.

LTSI is a project created/supported by Hitachi, LG Electronics, NEC, Panasonic, Qualcomm Atheros, Renesas Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sony and Toshiba, hosted at The Linux Foundation. It aims to maintain a common Linux base for use in a variety of consumer electronics products.

MLflow is an open source platform to manage the ML lifecycle, including experimentation, reproducibility, deployment, and a central model registry.

The Node.js Foundation existed from 2015 to 2019.[84] In 2019, the Node.js Foundation merged with the JS Foundation to form the new OpenJS Foundation.[79][80] with a stated mission to foster healthy growth of the JavaScript and web ecosystem as a whole.[81]

ODPi (Open Data Platform initiative) hosts open source projects that accelerate the development and delivery of big data solutions.[85] It aims to deliver well-defined open source and open data technologies that run across distributed devices. It promotes these technologies worldwide through certification programs and other forms of marketing.

ONOS (Open Network Operating System) is an open source community with a mission of bringing the promise of software-defined networking (SDN) to communications service providers in order to make networks more agile for mobile and data center applications with better economics for both users and providers.

OAI is committed to standardizing how REST APIs are described. SmartBear Software has donated the Swagger Specification directly to the initiative.[86] The new name for the specification is OpenAPI Specification.

The OpenBMC project is a collaborative open-source project whose goal is to produce an open source implementation of the Baseboard Management Controllers (BMC) Firmware Stack.[87][88]

The OpenChain Project aims to define effective open source software compliance in software supply chains. A key output is a reference specification[89] for "good" open source compliance, which has become the ISO/IEC 5230:2020 standard. Another output is a simple self-certification scheme that companies can submit to test their conformance with the standard.

In 2015, Docker & CoreOS launched the Open Container Initiative in partnership with The Linux Foundation to create a set of industry standards in the open around container formats and runtime.[90]

OpenDaylight is the leading open SDN platform, which aims to accelerate the adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in service provider, enterprise and research networks.

The OpenJS Foundation is made up of 29 open source JavaScript projects including Appium, Dojo, jQuery, and Node.js, and webpack.[91] Founding members included Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent.[80] It was founded in 2019 from a merger of JS Foundation and Node.js Foundation.[79][80] Its stated mission is to foster healthy growth of the JavaScript and web ecosystem by providing a neutral organization to host projects and collaboratively fund activities that benefit the ecosystem as a whole.[81]

The Open Mainframe Project aims to drive harmony across the mainframe community and to developed shared tool sets and resources. The project also endeavors to heighten participation of academic institutions in educating mainframe Linux engineers and developers.

OpenMAMA (Open Middleware Agnostic Messaging API)[92] is a lightweight vendor-neutral integration layer for systems built on top of a variety of message-oriented middleware.

Announced in October 2017, the goal of OpenMessaging is to act as a vendor-neutral open standard for distributed messaging/stream. The project is supported by Alibaba, Verizon's Oath business unit, and others.[93]

Linux/Unix CUPS printing architecture

The OpenPrinting workgroup is a website belonging to the Linux Foundation which provides documentation and software support for printing under Linux.[94] Formed as LinuxPrinting.org, in 2006 it became part of the Free Standards Group.

They developed a database that lists a wide variety of printers from various manufacturers. The database allows people to give a report on the support and quality of each printer, and they also give a report on the support given to Linux by each printer vendor. They have also created a foomatic (formerly cupsomatic) script which plugs into the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS).

OpenSDS is an open source software defined storage controller. As journalist Swapnil Bhartiya explained for CIO, it was formed to create "an industry response to address software-defined storage integration challenges with the goal of driving enterprise adoption of open standards." It is supported by storage users/vendors, including Dell, Huawei, Fujitsu, HDS, Vodafone and Oregon State University.[95]

Originally created at Nicira before moving to VMware (and eventually the Linux Foundation), OvS is an open source virtual switch supporting standard management interfaces and protocols.[96]

The Open Network Automation Platform is the result of OPEN-O and Open ECOMP projects merging in April 2017. The platform allows end users to design, manage, and automate services and virtual functions.

The Open Platform for Network Function Virtualization (NFV) "aims to be a carrier-grade, integrated platform that introduces new products and services to the industry more quickly."[97] In 2016, the project began an internship program, created a working group and an "End User Advisory Group" (founded by users & the board)

PNDA (Platform for Network Data Analytics)[98] is a platform for scalable network analytics, rounding up data from "multiple sources on a network and works with Apache Spark to crunch the numbers in order to find useful patterns in the data more effectively."[99]

The R Consortium is dedicated to expanding the use of R language and developing it further. R Consortium works with the R Foundation and other organizations working to broaden the reach of the language. The consortium is supported by a collection of tech industry heavyweights including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, and Esri.[100]

Real-Time Linux has an overall goal of encouraging widespread adoption of Real Time. It was formed to coordinate efforts to mainline PREEMPT_RT and assist maintainers in "continuing development work, long-term support and future research of RT."[101] Before 2004 there were research projects but no serious attempt at merging with mainline kernel. In 2004 Ingo Molnar start work on a patchset joined by Thomas Gleixner, who was working with Douglas Niehaus, and Steven Rostedt along with others. The patchset has seen rewriting and configuration has been merged into mainline kernel.[102][103]

Project is aimed at deterministic RTOS with work involving threaded interrupts and priority inheritance.[104] There is a wide range of requirements and use cases for RTOS and while project aims at large amounts of them it is not aiming for the most narrow and specialized range of cases.[105][106]

Unrelated work is done by FSMLabs for RTLinux.

After RethinkDB announced its shutdown as a business,[107] the Linux Foundation announced that it had purchased the intellectual property under its Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, which was then relicensed under the Apache License (ASLv2).[108] RethinkDB describes itself as "the first open-source, scalable JSON database built from the ground up for the realtime web."[109]

The RISC-V International association[110] is chartered to standardize and promote the open RISC-V instruction set architecture together with its hardware and software ecosystem for use in all computing devices.

seL4 is the only microkernel in existence which has been developed using formal verification techniques. It belongs to the L4 microkernel family and was, like the other L4 microkernels, designed to attain great security and performance.[111]

Servo is a browser engine developed to take advantage of the memory safety properties and concurrency features of the Rust programming language.[112] It was originally developed by Mozilla and later donated to the Linux Foundation.

Streaming Network Analytics System (project SNAS.io)[113] is an open source framework to collect and track millions of routers, peers, prefixes (routing objects) in real time. SNAS.io is a Linux Foundation Project announced in May 2017.

The Software Package Data eXchange (SPDX) project was started in 2010, to create a standard format for communicating the components, licenses and copyrights associated with software packages.[114] As part of the project, there is a team that curates the SPDX License List, which defines a list of identifiers for commonly found licenses and exceptions used for open source and other collaborative software.[115]

Tizen is a free and open-source, standards-based software platform supported by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and silicon suppliers for multiple device categories such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks, in-vehicle infotainment devices, and smart TVs.

TODO (Talk Openly, Develop Openly) is an open source collective housed under the Linux Foundation. It helps companies interested in open source collaborate better and more efficiently. TODO aims to reach companies and organizations that want to turn out the best open source projects and programs. "The TODO Group reaches across industries to collaborate with open source technical and business leaders to share best practices, tools and programs for building dependable, effective projects for the long term," said Jim Zemlin at Collaboration Summit 2016.[116]

The Xen Project team is a global open source community that develops the Xen Hypervisor, contributes to the Linux PVOPS framework, the Xen® Cloud Platform, and Xen® ARM.

The Yocto Project[117] is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products regardless of the hardware architecture. It was founded in 2010 as a collaboration among many hardware manufacturers, open-source operating systems vendors, and electronics companies to bring some order to the chaos of embedded Linux development.

Zephyr is a small real-time operating system for connected, resource-constrained devices supporting multiple architectures. It is developed as an open source collaboration project and released under the Apache License 2.0. Zephyr became a project of the Linux Foundation in February 2016.

In January 2016, the Linux Foundation announced a partnership with Goodwill Central Texas to help hundreds of disadvantaged individuals from underserved communities and a variety of backgrounds get the training they need to start new and lucrative careers in Linux IT.[118]

To fund deserving developers to accelerate technical problem solving and collaboration in the open source community, the Linux Foundation launched the Community Developer Travel Fund.[119] Sponsorships are open to elite community developers with a proven track record of open source development achievement who cannot get funding to attend technical events from employers.

In July 2020, the Linux Foundation announced an initiative allowing open source communities to create Open Standards using tools and methods inspired by open source developers.[120]

The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a project managed by the Linux Foundation that enables technology companies, industry stakeholders and esteemed developers to collaboratively identify and fund critical open source projects in need of assistance. In June 2015, the organization announced financial support of nearly $500,000 for three new projects to better support critical security elements of the global information infrastructure.[121] In May 2016, CII launched its Best Practice Badge program to raise awareness of development processes and project governance steps that will help projects have better security outcomes. In May 2017, CII issued its 100th badge to a passing project.[122]

The Linux Foundation's Open Compliance Program provides an array of programs for open source software compliance. The focus in this initiative is to educate and assist developers (and their companies) on license requirements in order to build programs without friction. The program consists primarily of self-administered training modules, but it is also meant to include automated tools to help programmatically identify license compliance issues.[123]

• Blockchain at Columbia
• Clemson University
• Indiana University
• Fondazione Inuit
• ISA
• Konkuk University
• NXT
• Seneca College
• Trace Research and Development Center at University of Maryland, College Park
• Turbot
• University of Rome Tor Vergata
• University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Zhejiang University

Before early 2018, the Linux Foundation's website stated that it "uses [donations] in part to help fund the infrastructure and fellows (like Linus Torvalds) who help develop the Linux kernel."[132]