Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects.
History
The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and promote the open-source operating system kernel Linux. It merged with Free Standards Group in 2007. The foundation has since evolved to promote open-source projects beyond the Linux OS as a "foundation of foundations" that hosts a variety of projects spanning topics such as cloud, networking, blockchain, and hardware. The foundation also hosts annual educational events among the Linux community, including the Linux Kernel Developers Summit and the Open Source Summit.Projects
, the total economic value of the development costs of Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects was estimated at $5 billion.| Project Name | Description |
| AllJoyn | AllJoyn is an open-source software framework that allows compatible devices and applications to find each other, communicate, and collaborate across the boundaries of product category, platform, brand, and connection type. |
| Automotive Grade Linux | Automotive Grade Linux 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, the AGL roadmap includes instrument clusters, heads-up displays, telematics, and autonomous driving. The goals of AGL are to provide:
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| Carrier Grade Linux | Carrier Grade Linux is a set of specifications that detail standards of availability, scalability, manageability, and service response characteristics which must be met for Linux kernel-based operating system to be considered carrier grade. |
| Cloud Foundry | Cloud Foundry is an open-source, multi-cloud application platform as a service governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. |
| Cloud Native Computing Foundation | The Cloud Native Computing Foundation was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution. |
| Continuous Delivery Foundation | The Continuous Delivery Foundation is an open-source community improving the world's ability to deliver software with security and speed. |
| Core Infrastructure Initiative | The Core Infrastructure Initiative was announced on 25 April 2014 in the wake of the Heartbleed security vulnerability to fund and support free and open-source software projects that are critical to the functioning of the Internet. |
| Data Plane Development Kit | The Data Plane Development Kit provides a set of libraries and network interface controller polling-mode drivers to accelerate CPU architecture-running packet processing workloads. |
| EdgeX Foundry | EdgeX Foundry is a vendor-neutral open-source platform providing a common framework for industrial IoT edge computing. |
| FinOps Foundation | The FinOps Foundation is dedicated to advancing people who practice the discipline of cloud financial management through best practices, education, and standards. |
| FRRouting | FRRouting is an IP routing protocol suite for Unix and Linux platforms. |
| The Global Synchronizer Foundation facilitates transparent and fair governance of the Global Synchronizer, the interoperability backbone of the Canton Network. | |
| IoTivity | The IoTivity is an open-source framework created to standardize inter-device connections for the IoT. |
| JanusGraph | JanusGraph is an open-source, graph database supporting global graph data analytics, reporting, and ETL. |
| LF AI & Data | The LF AI & Data Foundation is a project of The Linux Foundation that supports open-source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and data open-source projects. |
| LF Decentralized Trust | Umbrella project launched in October of 2024 that encompasses the Hyperledger ecosystem, Trust Over IP community, and new projects. |
| Linux Standard Base | The Linux Standard Base was a joint project by several Linux distributions to standardize the software system structure. |
| Lura | Lura is an open-source API gateway project hosted by the Linux Foundation. Originally developed as KrakenD, the project was rebranded as Lura when it joined the Linux Foundation in 2021. It focuses on building high-performance, extensible API gateways for modern architectures. |
| ONOS | Open Network Operating System is an open-source community to brings software-defined networking to communications service providers to make networks more agile for mobile and data center applications. |
| OpenAPI Specification | OpenAPI Specification is a specification for a machine-readable interface definition language for describing, producing, consuming and visualizing web services. |
| OpenBMC | The OpenBMC project is a collaborative open-source project whose goal is to produce an open-source implementation of the Baseboard Management Controllers Firmware Stack. |
| OpenChain | The OpenChain Project aims to define effective open-source software compliance in software supply chains. A key output is the ISO/IEC 5230 standard. |
| Open Container Initiative | 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. |
| OpenDaylight Project | The OpenDaylight project is an open-source platform for Software-Defined Networking that uses open protocols to provide centralized, programmatic control and network device monitoring. It aims to accelerate the adoption of SDN and Network Functions Virtualization in service providers, enterprises, and research networks. |
| OpenJS Foundation | OpenJS Foundation hosts projects and funds activities to support the long-term sustainability of the JavaScript and web ecosystem as a whole. |
| OpenSearch Software Foundation | The OpenSearch Software Foundation funds activities to support OpenSearch, an open source search and analytics suite that eases ingestion, search, visualization, and analyzing data |
| Open Source Security Foundation | The Open Source Security Foundation works towards a collaborative effort to improve the security of the open-source software ecosystem. |
| Open Mainframe Project | The Open Mainframe Project is a Collaborative Project to encourage the use of Linux-based operating systems and open-source software on mainframe computers. |
| OpenPrinting | develops Internet Printing Protocol based printing technology for Linux- and Unix-based operating systems |
| Open vSwitch | Originally created at Nicira before moving to VMware, OvS is an open source virtual switch supporting standard management interfaces and protocols. |
| ONAP | 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. |
| OpenTofu | Initially known as OpenTF, OpenTofu is a software project for infrastructure as code born as a fork of Terraform as part of a response from opensource community and companies after licensing changes in Terraform. It was eventually admitted as a Linux Foundation project under his current name. |
| OPNFV | The Open Platform for Network Function Virtualization "aims to be a carrier-grade, integrated platform that introduces new products and services to the industry more quickly." In 2016, the project began an internship program, created a working group and an "End User Advisory Group" |
| Overture Maps Foundation | In mid-December 2022, the foundation announced the launch of a new mapping collaboration, the Overture Maps Foundation. Its founding members were Amazon Web Services, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom. It is intended to be complementary to the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap project and the foundation encourages members to contribute data directly to OSM. |
| PyTorch Foundation | The PyTorch Foundation Originally incubated by Meta’s AI team, PyTorch has grown to include a massive community of contributors and users under their community-focused stewardship. |
| React | Originally created by Meta React is a front-end JavaScript library that aims to make building user interfaces based on components more seamless. |
| RethinkDB | After RethinkDB announced its shutdown as a business, 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. RethinkDB describes itself as "the first open-source, scalable JSON database built from the ground up for the realtime web." |
| RISC-V | The RISC-V International association 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 | 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. |
| Software Package Data Exchange | The Software Package Data Exchange project was started in 2010, to create a standard format for communicating the components, licenses, and copyrights associated with software packages. 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. |
| Tizen | 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. |
| TLA+ | The TLA+ Foundation manages the development of TLA+. TLA+ is a formal specification language for modeling programs and systems, especially concurrent and distributed ones. |
| Valkey | Valkey is an open-source in-memory key–value database, used as a distributed cache and message broker, with optional durability. It holds all data in memory and offers low-latency reads and writes. It started as a fork of Redis after licensing changes. |
| Xen Project | The Xen Project team is a global open-source community that develops the Xen Hypervisor, and contributes to the Linux PVOPS framework, the Xen® Cloud Platform, and Xen® ARM. |
| Yocto Project | The Yocto Project 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 Project | Zephyr is a small real-time operating system for connected, resource-constrained devices supporting multiple architectures. It was 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. |