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The erstwhile executive director of the Free Standards Group, Jim Zemlin, will head up the Foundation. The OSDL's chief Stuart Cohen left in December of last year.

Linus Torvalds will continue in his OSDl role of leading development of the Linux kernel at the Linux Foundation and continue to enjoy sponsorship from the body.

The Free Standards Group manages the Linux Standards Base - a set of technical standards to which all Linux distributions adhere - which will now fall under the Foundation's remit.

The Foundation itself will also continue to enjoy funding from leading tech companies that have followed the bodies through the merger, with Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, and Oracle among the Foundation's sponsors.

The new group has been formed in response to the needs of a consolidating market

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in order to sustain freedom of choice while offering customers the same level of support and service as vendors of proprietary platforms such as Microsoft.

'Computing is entering a world dominated by two platforms: Linux and Windows. While being managed under one roof has given Windows some consistency, Linux offers freedom of choice, customization and flexibility without forcing customers into vendor lock-in,' said Zemlin. 'The Linux Foundation helps in the next stage of Linux growth by organizing the diverse companies and constituencies of the Linux ecosystem to promote, protect, and standardize Linux.'

Some of the areas on which the Linux Foundation will concentrate will be bringing Linux up to speed with proprietary solutions. Different versions of Linux, for example, are not binary compatible, meaning that applications are certified for specific versions and can hamper a customer's upgrade path if they are forced into upgrading both platform and application together.

So backwards compatibility will be one area of development for the Foundation, along with promotion and collaboration and standardisation.

In addition the role of providing legal cover to users of open-source software will be maintained, with sponsorship of the Linux Legal Defense Fund. It will also manage the Linux trademark and the Patent Commons project, which oversees patents donated for use by the open-source community.