Open source community gets a roof over its head

The Open Source Development Lab is funded by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and NEC and is designed for those who are adding enterprise capabilities for Linux.

Announced last August, the lab will not initially create new projects but rather will help accelerate current projects developed by the open source community. The lab will support existing industry projects that use open source licences.

The lab will be governed by an independent board and management structure and will consist of members from the open source community as well as representatives from the sponsor companies. An independent executive director will implement policy.

One of the board appointees Brian Behlendorf, chief technical officer of CollabNet and co-founder of Apache, said the Open Source Development Lab will help fulfill a need that individual Linux and open source developers often have - access to high-end enterprise hardware. Behlendorf is among the board appointees.

Additional sponsors of the lab include Caldera, Dell, Linuxcare, LynuxWorks, Red Hat, SGI, SuSE, TurboLinux and VA Linux.