OREANDA-NEWS. Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) has announced its participation in the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP), a collaborative project targeting civil infrastructure systems and hosted by the Linux Foundation. As a project founder and board member, Toshiba will contribute experience gained in applying Linux to a wide variety of products – from consumer electronics to control systems for power plants – with a special emphasis on providing a secure and reliable common software platform that is maintainable over the long-term.

The Linux Foundation is a non-profit consortium that supports Linux and the development of collaborative software projects like “Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)”, a Linux platform for connected cars, and the “Cloud Foundry Foundation”, which aims to extend current PaaS. CIP is a new project that involves the cooperation of several industries, and its main goal is to develop open source software (OSS) for civil infrastructure systems.

The global trend for IoT/ICT technologies for civil infrastructure systems to be network- capable is making adoption of Linux and OSS in civil infrastructure systems increasingly important. These systems must give the highest priority to safety and security, while at the same time delivering reliability, sustainability and interoperability. Traditionally, companies have worked separately to tackle these issues, but these are common concerns that can best be solved collectively, and industry increasingly recognizes the need for the flexible support that can be achieved by collaborating in open source development.