Open source is the concept of making source code freely available for modification by the community, but in actuality it is much more than that. Open source is a powerful and influential movement. It's a collaboration of efforts and ideas that help to build better, more reliable, and more secure software.

MontaVista supports the spirit of open source and believes in contributing, participating and publishing its work and contributions to the many projects in the community. MontaVista wholeheartedly supports the open source community and fully embraces the commitments and responsibilities that come with the development model, and as a testimony to this commitment, MontaVista cycles all Linux engineering developments back into the community.

Open source is about freedom and empowerment: freedom to choose your own software, freedom to modify the source code as appropriate, freedom to develop better products, and the power to be creative.

Open Source Projects

The Open Source community is made up of millions of developers working on thousands of projects. Listed below are some of the projects in which MontaVista has been involved. Each project is a collaborative effort, driven by MontaVista developers and open source developers worldwide.

Dynamic Power Management (DPM) Project - explores technologies to improve power conservation capabilities of platforms based on open source software

The openais Project - to implement a production quality "Revised BSD" licensed implementation of the SA Forum's Application Interface Specification

Open IPMI Project - aims to develop an open code base to allow access to platform information using Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI)

Protected RAM File System (PRAMFS) - minimizes opportunities for errant writes that can corrupt file system data in system RAM

Hardware Enablement

MontaVista is unique, with support for seven leading architecture families, and far more processors and board-level platforms than any other Linux company. We continually add additional processors, platforms, and boards, contributing significant effort to hardware enablement projects including:

ARM Linux - ARM Linux is a port of the successful Linux Kernel to ARM processor based machines.

Floating-point Support Code for ARM - Hand-coded floating-point support code for ARM. It is both significantly smaller and faster than the existing C-based implementation.

MIPS Linux - is the primary Linux community site for the MIPS architecture.

PowerPC Linux - the home for Linux on the PowerPC family of processors.

Texas Instruments OMAP Processors - TI develops open source Linux software for most OMAP processors as well as collaborating with MontaVista Software, Inc. for commercial linux offerings.

Open Source Resources

The following is a list of resources to learn more about Linux and open source.

The Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundations mission is to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of all Free Software users.

Open Bar is a nonprofit organization educating developers and legal professionals about open source/free software. MontaVista vice president of corporate affairs and general counsel Jason Wacha is a founder and director.

The Linux Foundation (formerly Open Source Development Lab) The Linux Foundation is a non-profit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. It includes the organization formerly known as OSDL, a resource lab for open source developers, enabling technology projects to support enterprise and telecom applications.

Kernel.org Kernel.org is the primary site for the Linux kernel source

SourceForge SourceForge.net is the world's largest Open Source software development web site, hosting more than 100,000 projects.

LinuxDevices.com LinuxDevices.com is the industry leading news site for the Embedded Linux community.

The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) is focused on the advancement of Linux as an open source platform for consumer electronics.