Competition Among Open Source Projects Delivers Better Technology Faster

Today we’re pleased to announce that The Linux Foundation will host the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), the organization dedicated to education and advocacy for KVM. KVM is growing in popularity among businesses and open source communities like OpenStack with a 50 percent increase in deployments this year, according to IDC. We will work with OVA to extend education and advocacy that supports and helps advance the important work of this developer community.

IDC recently reported that the cost-saving impacts of virtualization for business are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This is more than a little compelling and companies are investing now more than ever in virtualization technologies. The benefits of open source and collaborative development – from additional cost savings to cutting-edge technology features to flexibility and customization – are putting technologies like KVM at the top of the list for consideration by CIOs. That’s good for Linux.

As many folks already know, The Xen Project is also a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. We love that a number of open source projects can emerge to address similar questions to complex technology problems. Competition gives way to collaboration and cross-pollination, and everyone benefits. The more open source code, the better for everyone. Historically in open source we’ve witnessed that competition and collaboration among open source projects can advance and accelerate technology. 

As companies and developers have approached us about supporting their collaborative development work over the years, The Linux Foundation has identified specific opportunities where it can host and help advance important efforts by the Linux and open source community. We don’t take our role lightly here. There are very important collaborations going on across multiple industries and much of that work is focused on transforming markets. Much is at stake.

That’s why it is a priority for The Linux Foundation to foster collaboration across open source communities, whether it’s the open virtualization community, open embedded, open networking or open science community. We believe that by supporting both Open Virtualization Alliance and the Xen Project, The Linux Foundation can help advance the state of Linux virtualization for all. 

Please join us in welcoming the Open Virtualization Alliance to The Linux Foundation!