Ken King, general manager for OpenPower at IBM, says that at this point in his organisation's evolution, they wanted to move it under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.  He added that it was open-sourcing some of the technical underpinnings of the Power Series chip to make it easier for developers and engineers to build on top of the technology.

On the outsourcing list is the Power Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) which are the definitions developers use for ensuring hardware and software work together on Power.

King sees open-sourcing this technology as an important step for several reasons around licensing and governance.

"The first thing is that we are taking the ability to be able to implement what we're licensing, the ISA instruction set architecture, for others to be able to implement on top of that instruction set royalty-free with patent rights. The company is also putting this under an open governance workgroup at the OpenPower Foundation", King said.