CHICAGO, IL -- (Marketwired) -- 08/20/14 -- (LinuxCon and CloudOpen) - The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced that Adapteva, GitHub, SanDisk, Seagate and Western Digital are joining the organization. These companies join the more than 200 existing members in supporting Linux and fostering collaboration on a truly massive scale.

A new approach to developing software that embraces open source, online code sharing, and lower barriers to entry is taking off within enterprises. Within the storage industry, for example, a growing dependency on digital data is driving new innovations in areas such as flash technology, cloud services and cloud-based storage, and Linux is paving the way. Through massive collaboration, companies across all industries are building better software and competitive differentiation, proven by the millions of open source projects hosted by GitHub alone.

More information about the new Linux Foundation members:

Adapteva, Inc., a semiconductor manufacturer based in Lexington, Mass., develops a highly energy-efficient and scalable multicore processor chip for high-performance computing applications. Adapteva's Epiphany multicore architecture represents a new class of massively parallel computer architectures targeted at devices requiring extreme energy efficiency. Adapteva is also the sponsor of the Parallella Project aimed at democratizing access to supercomputing. Powered by ARM and Epiphany processors, the Parallella is a Linux-based, credit card-sized single board computer used by a large community of researchers and developers to drive forward the state of the art in parallel computing.

"An immediate transition to massive parallel processing is needed in order to continue the exponential year-over-year computing improvements that we have seen over the last 30 years. The hardware exists already, but unfortunately only a small portion of the world's programmers are able to make use of the parallel hardware in existence today," said Andreas Olofsson, CEO and Founder of Adapteva. "Leveraging Linux and open source for the Parallella Project, our goal is to enable the critical research and education needed to finally make parallel computing ubiquitous in the marketplace. As Linux Foundation members, we'll be able to bring the benefits of open source and parallel processing to scientific computing, telecommunications, and embedded applications as quickly as possible."

Based on the open source distributed version control system Git, written by Linux creator and Linux Foundation Fellow Linus Torvalds, GitHub provides powerful code sharing, management and review for open source and private projects. As the world's largest code host, more than six million people use GitHub to write better software faster. GitHub offers software development and collaboration on GitHub.com, desktop apps and GitHub Enterprise.

"GitHub is dedicated to ensuring the continued development, advancement, and well-being of Linux, and advocating for the growth and adoption of Git," said Chris Kelly, Developer Evangelist at GitHub. "As Linux Foundation members, we're looking forward to working toward this with some of the world's largest organizations embracing open source in their businesses."

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) is a global leader in flash storage solutions with the broadest portfolio of flash-memory based solutions in the industry. The company's products are used in many of the world's largest data centers, as well as embedded in advanced laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Open source is an engine for innovation in many of the markets in which SanDisk plays, including mobile, cloud, enterprise and connected consumer devices.

"SanDisk is pleased to join other industry leaders in supporting open source and Linux through our involvement with the foundation -- a key gathering place within the community," said Nithya Ruff, Director, SanDisk Open Source Strategy Office. "By engaging in open source projects that are important to our target markets, we can continue to deliver innovative products for our customers and support a thriving open source community with tools, technical contributions and employment."

Seagate offers the industry's broadest portfolio of hard disk drives, solid-state drives and solid-state hybrid drives. From video, music and documents shared through social networks to servers that form the backbone of enterprise data centers and cloud-based computing, to desktop and tablets, Seagate products help businesses and people store, share and protect their valuable digital content. In addition, the company offers an extensive line of retail storage products for consumers and small businesses, along with data-recovery services for any brand of hard drive and digital media type.

"Linux Foundation membership will help accelerate Seagate's R&D and product development with data storage, while offering our customers lower TCO and optimal performance," said Mike Miller, Engineering Director at Seagate. "By embracing open collaboration and technologies, Seagate is able to offer highly competitive, optimized, and scalable server and storage solutions for the cloud."

Western Digital is one of the largest manufacturers of reliable hard drives and solid state drives. Its companies design and manufacture storage devices, networking equipment and home entertainment products under the WD, HGST and G-Technology brands. The company's products and services are used to store, manage, experience and preserve digital information and content in the cloud, mobile devices, business and personal computers, external storage devices, home video recorders; as well as in sophisticated medical, military, aerospace, automotive, manufacturing and telecommunications systems.

"Despite size or industry, nearly every business is interested in lowering their ever-escalating storage costs," said James Borden, Director of Enterprise Storage Marketing, Western Digital. "New cloud-based services and social networks also require novel approaches to long-term storage, archiving and backup. We are joining the Linux Foundation because we believe open source will play a key role in driving developments with new, imaginative solutions for solving emerging storage challenges."

"Today's new Linux Foundation members not only showcase how important Linux is, but also illustrate the profound impact open collaboration has in building better software," said Amanda McPherson, Chief Marketing Officer at The Linux Foundation. "Our new storage members are embracing a more software-centric approach to storage and also value openness as a way to generate rapid storage, flash and disk drive innovation. We look forward to their ongoing contributions to Linux and Github's visionary leadership on code collaboration and development."

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo, Tizen, and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.