The Linux Foundation | 29 April 2026
Decade of infrastructure safety for critical sectors like energy, manufacturing, and healthcare
SAN FRANCISCO – April 28, 2026 – The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP), a collaborative, open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation, today commemorates its 10th anniversary. Originally formed in 2016 by industry leaders in railways, electric power, and factory automation, CIP is celebrating the maturity of its industrial grade Linux development activities – including Super Long Term Support (SLTS), CIP Core, and advanced testing – as a foundational platform for global critical infrastructure.
As industrial systems face new regulatory requirements like the European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), which mandates long-term software safety and supply chain transparency, CIP has evolved into an indispensable digital public good. By providing a certified and long-term maintained base layer, containing the Linux kernel and the most commonly used core packages, CIP allows companies to meet stringent safety requirements without the prohibitive costs and risks of building proprietary solutions.
"Ten years ago, when we declared we would support critical infrastructure with open source, many were skeptical about its continuity," said Urs Gleim, CIP Governing Board Chair and Head of Central Research and Development at Siemens. "But today, CIP has become an indispensable foundation supporting railways and power grids worldwide, achieving against that ambitious goal set ten years ago to maintain industrial-grade open source for decades."
Key impacts of CIP include:
- Security Standardization: CIP significantly reduced certification costs for infrastructure companies through compliance with IEC 62443 standards.
- Sustainable Ecosystem: By returning feedback and fixes from the industrial sector to upstream communities, CIP continues to improve the overall quality of Linux for users, agencies, and communities alike.
- Expanding Global Collaboration: CIP brings together a cohort of global competitors across Europe, Asia, and into the Americas to jointly safeguard the security of social infrastructure.
The project’s work is critical for sectors where downtime is unacceptable and updates are difficult, such as power plant turbines, smart grid control devices, railway monitoring, traffic management systems, and advanced medical devices. In the current landscape of 2026, CIP also serves as a deterministic and safe Linux for securely running edge AI within infrastructure.
A comprehensive look at the CIP journey is available in a blog post.
For more information about CIP or project membership, please visit the CIP Project Home or join the growing developer community at CIP GitLab.
Supporting Quotes
"Our mission is not just to maintain code. It is to continuously provide 'unwavering trust' through technology in an increasingly digitized society."
– Yoshitake Kobayashi, CIP Technical Steering Committee Chair and Assistant General Manager at Toshiba
“The collaboration between Freexian and the CIP community around Debian LTS and ELTS demonstrates how enterprises can interact with the open source community to support the long-term maintenance of critical software. By building its industrial Linux on Debian, and by funding the Debian LTS project, CIP contributes to Debian's sustainability while addressing the real needs of long-lived industrial systems. This kind of collaboration strengthens both the critical infrastructure built on Debian and the wider open source ecosystem.”
– Raphaël Hertzog, Debian Developer and Founder of Freexian
“CIP has been a core contributor to the KernelCI project since its formation as a Linux Foundation initiative, taking long-term responsibility for stabilizing and sustaining KernelCI itself, not just using it for testing long-term supported kernels. Through this sustained collaboration, KernelCI has continued to strengthen Linux kernel quality across architectures, helping make industrial-grade Linux a practical reality.”
– Kevin Hilman, co-founder of KernelCI and CTO & co-founder BayLibre
“The collaboration between the Reproducible Builds project and CIP highlights a critical shift in how we approach industrial software. Through verifiability, CIP ensures that the open source foundation of our critical infrastructure is not only sustainable but also demonstrably secure. This commitment to transparency is vital for the trust and resilience required by critical systems over decades of operation.”
– Chris Lamb, Core Team Member of the Reproducible Builds Project
About the Civil Infrastructure Platform
The Civil Infrastructure Platform (“CIP”) is a collaborative, open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation. The CIP project is focused on establishing an open source “base layer” of industrial grade software to enable the use and implementation of software building blocks in civil infrastructure projects across energy, transportation, smart city, manufacturing, healthcare, and communication Infrastructure applications. CIP is supported by key members including Renesas Electronics, Siemens, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, Aronetics, CyberTrust, Hitachi, and MOXA. Visit https://cip-project.org/ to learn more.
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