IBM announced Tuesday morning at LinuxCon that they will be investing 1Billion dollars into linux development. Linux is becoming very popular in data centers and IBM wants to capitalize on that by making more of that growth happen on their hardware.
IBM plans to spend the money pledged over four or five years on Linux and related open-source technologies for use on its Power line of server systems, which is based on the internally developed chip technology of the same name.
Linux has become the mainstay operating system for many servers particularly those used in Datacenters by big Web companies like Google and Facebook. Most of those machines are x86 servers, which take their name from the underlying chip design sold by Intel and AMD.
IBM, though it sells such machines, also adapted Linux for use on its mainframes and its Power servers. Power servers tend to be good at heavy-duty computing jobs, such as running large databases. IBM has enjoyed much growth in there Linux sales since there original pledge in 2000.
Linux helped popularize the open-source model, based on letting users and others view and modify the underlying instructions used to create a program. The software available for free, which is quite a draw for companies that buy servers by the thousands.