Intel Uses Open-Source, OpenStack Cloud to Its Advantage

At LinuxCon, Dirk Hohndel, Intel's chief Linux and open-source technologist, explains why Intel is invested in open source and what his company is doing with the OpenStack cloud.

NEW ORLEANS—Intel is a leading contributor to Linux as well as many other important open-source efforts, including the OpenStack cloud effort. In a keynote presentation Sept 18 at the LinuxCon conference here, Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux and open-source technologist at Intel, detailed why open source is important to Intel for development and for the cloud.

The theme for Hohndel's keynote was all about new frontiers for Linux. He began by telling the capacity audience that for most of the general population, Linux is invisible and they don't know what it is. That said, he noted that all you have to do is tell people that if they're using Google, Facebook or Twitter, then they're using Linux. All of those major Web properties are powered by Linux infrastructure.

The desktop is another area that is a new frontier for Linux, even though Hohndel jokingly remarked he's been saying it has been the year of the Linux desktop for some time. He pointed to the recent success of Google's Chromebooks—Linux-powered devices that use the Chrome browser as their key method of accessing applications—as an avenue for the Linux desktop. Intel recently announced a push to get hardware vendors to use its Haswell chips inside Chromebooks...