IBM has been a leading proponent of the Open Source Initiative, and began supporting <answer>Linux</answer> in 1998. The company invests billions of dollars in services and software based on <answer>Linux</answer> through the IBM <answer>Linux</answer> Technology Center, which includes over 300 <answer>Linux</answer> kernel developers. IBM has also released code under different open source licenses, such as the platform-independent software framework Eclipse (worth approximately US$40 million at the time of the donation), the three-sentence International Components for Unicode (ICU) license, and the Java-based relational database management system (RDBMS) Apache Derby. IBM's open source involvement has not been trouble-free, however (see SCO v. IBM).
IBM began supporting this in 1998.
Linux