Overview
The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration around Power ISA-based products initiated by IBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. IBM is opening up technology surrounding their Power Architecture offerings, such as processor specifications, firmware and software with a liberal license, and will be using a collaborative development model with their partners.
The goal is to enable the server vendor ecosystem to build their own customized server, networking and storage hardware for future data centers and cloud computing.
The governing body around the Power ISA instruction set is now the OpenPOWER Foundation: IBM allows its patents to be royalty-free
for Compliant implementations. Processors based on IBM's IP can now be fabricated on any foundry and mixed with other hardware products of the integrator's choice.
On August 20, 2019, IBM announced that the OpenPOWER Foundation would become part of the Linux Foundation.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).