Trillian team releases IA-64 Linux to open source community

The source code for the Trillian project, the Linux port to Intel's forthcoming IA-64, is being released to the open source community, the Trillian team announced today. The move is an intriguing innovation - 'normal' OS developers usually work with pre-production versions of new chips, but by putting code out into open source now, the Trillian team is pioneering the application of the 'Linux effect' to this process. Trillian kicked off early last year under the auspices of VA Linux System, Intel and HP, and Caldera, CERN, IBM, Red Hat, SGI, SuSE and Turbolinux are now also on board. Programme director Sri Chilukuri commented today that the source code release "is further proof that companies and the open source community can work together to achieve common goals." One might suggest that the real proof will come after they've done so successfully, but that would be churlish on Trillian's big day. But the move is an interesting bet. We can presume that the groundwork the Trillian team have done will be approximately equivalent to the efforts of SCO-IBM, Sun, and (we'll give them the benefit of the doubt here) Microsoft. So by kicking it out into the open now, the Trillian partners reckon they can achieve massive momentum for Linux IA-64. Nobody can know for sure what effect this could have, but it's possible the result will be Linux taking the lead on Itanium. ® The source code is available at www.kernel.org. The beef on Project Trillian is at www.linuxia64.org