The Linux Foundation announced Monday that three companies have joined the organization -- mobile hardware maker Hisense, application and network acceleration provider Solarflare, and server manufacturer Thomas-Krenn.
Additionally, the foundation said Sunday evening that the Xen Project would become the latest Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, giving the open-source hypervisor's development community access to the foundation's expertise and infrastructure.
[ RELATED: Citrix bequeaths Xen to Linux Foundation ]
The announcements were made as part of the opening of the seventh annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which began Monday in San Francisco.
Of the three new members, the highest-profile is likely Hisense, a company backed by the Chinese government specializing in custom mobile hardware for business use. According to the foundation, Hisense uses Linux as an operating system on many of its mobile products.
A recent focus on mobility by the foundation proved attractive to Hisense, Vice General Manager Li Fu said in a statement.
"The Linux Foundation and its members are working to advance Linux-based mobile technologies and we look forward to contributing to the Code Aurora Forum (CAF) as part of our commitment to that work and to help us innovate faster and deliver new products that meet market demand," Li said.
California-based Solarflare is heavily invested in Linux as a base for many of its network optimization products, and promotes the use of software-defined networking via the open-source OpenFlow standard.
"OpenSource software and Linux is critical to both to Solarflare's and to our customers' success. We have supported the maintenance of the Linux ethtool network interface utility for many years and we ship multiple OpenSource Linux based products," said Vice President of Solutions and Outbound Marketing Bruce Tolley.
Thomas-Krenn's work in high-performance computing brings it heavily into contact with Linux, and CEO Christoph Maier said that won't change anytime soon.
"The demand for Linux is still rapidly growing in the enterprise. Research firms report it, and it's being proven in our customer deployments every day. We want to contribute to this rising platform and be a part of that growth and collaboration," he said.
Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.
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