IBM, NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi are to pool their enterprise-oriented Linux software development resources, according to NEC.

There's no formal arrangement here, it seems. Rather the four - or their Japanese operations, at least - will do the corporate equivalent of swapping notes and making sure their own development work isn't duplicating any of the other partners' efforts.

"The four companies have various areas of expertise and many customers such as banks with mission-critical needs, and will consult with each other and split things up efficiently so as to avoid any overlap," an NEC spokesman, cited by Reuters, said today.

"Linux has not yet reached the enterprise level," he added. "There are a lot of things that need to be done there."

The four companies are already sponsors of the Open Source Development Lab, an industry-backed joint development project that will soon be expanding from its US base into a second facility near Tokyo. Their enterprise-oriented efforts will supplement the broader work being undertaken by the OSDL, the spokesman said.

The co-operation should accelerate product development, he added, with software becoming available over the next couple of years. ®