Valve has joined the Linux Foundation – a move that shows the company’s ever increasing love the Linux and one which will help it to take gaming on Linux to the next level alongside the HSA Foundation and Cloudius System.
Valve already has 65 million active users on its Steam platform and has plans of expanding gaming on Linux with Steam Machines project – a living room device which will be powered by its Linux-based operating system.
The Linux Foundation hopes to contribute the tools while also compelling hardware manufacturers to prioritize support for Linux. Mike Sartain at Valve wrote “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.”
Another company joining the non-profit organization is Cloudius Systems, which is a startup headed by KVM hypervisor originators. The company is developing a new open source operating system capable of handling virtualized cloud workloads. Dor Laor, CEO Cloudius Systems, said “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 non-profit backed by the likes of AMD, ARM, Qualcomm and Samsung, develops open-standard architecture specifications for heterogeneous parallel computing. Gregory Stoner, vice president and managing director of the HSA Foundation said, “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.”
Find the Linux Foundation’s press release here).
