Real Time Linux becomes a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project

The Linux Foundation has announced yet another ‘Collaborative Project’ – Real Time Linux Collaborative Project (TRLCP). The announcement was made during LinuxCon Europe which was held in Dublin October 5-7. One of the main goals of the RTLCP will be to push critical code upstream to be reviewed and eventually merged into the mainline Linux kernel where it will receive ongoing support. RT Linux is used in applications that are time sensitive such as robotics, data acquisition systems, manufacturing plants, and other such instruments and machines. As a Collaborative Project of the Linux Foundation it will benefit from the partners who already collaborate on dozens of other projects under the foundation’s umbrella. Sam Ramji, the CEO of Cloud Foundry, recently told me in an interview that as a collaborative project “they borrow some best practices on managing the business and also a lot of common capabilities like human resources, finance, web marketing, etc. which has been fantastic.” It also helps with events as the playing fields overlap and events like LinuxCon bring executives and developers from different industries together and that’s where projects meet other projects, new alliances are forged, new relationships built. With this project, the Linux Foundation is getting another fellow: Thomas Gleixner, the long time maintainer of RTLinux, who would join the ranks of Linus Torvalds and Greg KH. Linux Foundation sponsors the work of fellows so they don’t have to worry about finding ‘jobs’ and can keep their focus on their projects. Google is the platinum founding member of the project, joined by players like National Instruments, OSADL, Texas Instruments, Altera, ARM, Intel and IBM.