Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has joined the Linux Foundation.

"They have rallied the cause of cross-industry, cross-community collaboration for years," said Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation executive director. Canonical also supports open source projects such as Bazaar, for revision control; the Storm object-relational mapper, and the Upstart start-up manager.

"The Linux Foundation occupies a critical, non-commercial function in the use and popularisation of Linux around the world. We've always seen the Linux Foundation's value and are pleased to now become an official member and support its activities. We look forward to working with them to continue the march of Linux in all areas of computing," said Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu programme manager and CTO at Canonical, also in a statement supplied by the foundation.

The Linux Foundation serves as a nonprofit consortium fostering the growth of Linux. It sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds.