Twitter joins up with Linux Foundation

The microblogging company Twitter is joining the Linux Foundation as a silver member. The official announcement is due on Tuesday at the start of the LinuxCon North America and CloudOpen conferences being held in San Diego by the Linux Foundation. Other new Foundation members to be announced will be Inktank, the commercial developer and supporter of the Ceph distributed filesystem, and Servergy, maker of high efficiency server systems for data centres.

Twitter will become a silver member of the Linux Foundation – this level of membership costs around $15,000 per year. The company uses Linux in-house to power its microblogging service, which has 140 million active users and processes around 400 million tweets a day. Although it hasn't contributed to Linux itself, Twitter has a number of open source projects and contributions to its name. Twitter's Chris Aniszczyk, manager of Open Source, pointed to Linux's ability to be heavily tweaked as a reason for its successful deployment at the company, adding: "By joining The Linux Foundation we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that are advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter".

The Ceph community has long worked with the Linux community; the distributed filesystem was integrated into the mainline Linux kernel around three years ago. Inktank says its membership of the Linux Foundation "is formalizing its commitment to Linux". Servergy, a 2009 startup, makes servers that rely on Linux to deliver "top performance per watt", with its own architecture that reduces energy and space usage in the data centre. The company's CEO, Bill Mapp, said it was looking forward to making contributions to the advancement of Linux.

(djwm)