Cloudius Systems, HSA Foundation and Valve Join Linux Foundation

Gaming, Cloud and Parallel Computing Industries Invest in Linux and Collaborative Development  

SAN FRANCISCO, December 4, 2013 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Cloudius Systems, HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation and Valve are joining the organization.

The newest Linux Foundation members represent both nascent open source endeavors as well as established industry leaders. Companies from diverse markets, such as gaming, cloud computing and virtualization are seeing the value of Linux and collaborative development to put them out in front of competitors. 

For example, Valve recently announced its plans to expand its Steam platform, with 65 million active accounts and games from hundreds of developers, into the living room with the Steam Machines project. An innovative living room device, the Steam Machines will be powered by a Linux-based operating system dubbed the Steam OS.  At the same time, emerging cloud, virtualization, big data and device-driven computing companies are taking advantage of open development and collaboration to ignite innovation. 

More information about today’s newest Linux Foundation members:

Cloudius Systems is a startup company led by the KVM hypervisor originators, developing a new open source operating system to handle virtualized cloud workloads. Launched at CloudOpen North America recently, OSv is designed and optimized to run on top of the KVM, Xen and ESX hypervisors to simplify and accelerate cloud computing. This eliminates the redundancies, overhead and complexity typical with many of today’s cloud application deployments.

“The Linux Foundation is one of the most influential advocates for open cloud technologies, projects and companies. Its inclusiveness and broad reach is  incredibly unique in the industry,” said Dor Laor, chief executive officer, Cloudius Systems. “As Linux Foundation members, we’ll be able to take advantage of both Linux’s large presence plus the Foundation’s open cloud network and events.”

HSA Foundation, a nonprofit backed by founding members AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and many others, is dedicated to developing open-standard architecture specifications to advance heterogeneous parallel computing.

“Joining The Linux Foundation is a natural fit for the HSA Foundation as we strongly believe in supporting an open ecosystem, and the HSA Foundation is focused on bringing richer heterogeneous computing into mobile, cloud-based and big data computing where Linux dominate,” said Gregory Stoner, vice president and managing director of the HSA Foundation.

Valve is well-known for its award-winning games and Steam, a leading software distribution platform with more than 65 million active accounts. The company recently announced the SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system that will power its Steam Machine living room devices. 

“Joining the Linux Foundation is one of many ways Valve is investing in the advancement of Linux gaming. Through these efforts, we hope to contribute tools for developers building new experiences on Linux, compel hardware manufacturers to prioritize support for Linux, and ultimately deliver an elegant and open platform for Linux users,” said Mike Sartain of Valve. 

“Our membership continues to grow as both new and mature entities embrace community development and open technologies,” said Mike Woster, chief operating officer, The Linux Foundation. “Our new members believe Linux is a strategic investment that allows their markets to evolve as quickly as possible to achieve long-term viability and competitiveness.” 

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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