Automakers have focused on the In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI) System as their first target for open source software collaboration, specifically using Linux. Here are five reasons this approach makes sense.

If you’ve ever dreamed of working directly with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Ted T’so or any of the other Linux luminaries, you could work your way up through the ranks of kernel developers submitting patches and fixing bugs.  Or you could work as a systems administrator on The Linux Foundation’s IT team, managing the servers that they use every day to build the largest collaborative software development project in the world.

File storage and sharing using consumer-oriented cloud services can be a security problem for companies that want to avoid sensitive data leaks. ownCloud aims to solve the issue by offering commercial cloud services installed within a company's own datacenter. Their open source software is built on Linux and most often deployed on Linux by enterprise customers, said Markus Rex, CTO of ownCloud, via email. Here, Rex discusses where ownCloud fits into the open cloud ecosystem, what it means to be an open source company, how to ensure security with open source software and why they recently joined The Linux Foundation.

The open source cloud discussion has noticeably shifted over the past year, away from whether the industry needs an open source alternative to the Amazon Web Services API and toward providing services that Amazon doesn't offer.