Arm is one of the most influential names in chip design. Their processor architectures power billions of devices, from smartphones to cloud servers, with a considerable chunk of the developer population working on them.
Lately, it seems the tech industry has been in a collaborative mood. Just recently, Meta moved React under a dedicated foundation for open, neutral governance. Now, another collective has formed with a similar spirit, but for Arm.
CoreCollective: Big Names Team Up
Arm and Linaro have jointly announced CoreCollective, a free and open industry consortium focused on furthering the Arm software ecosystem. The goal is to give companies a neutral space to collaborate on shared software challenges.
If you didn't know of Linaro, it is a UK-based organization that has been around since 2010 with the goal to weave together the fragmented Arm software ecosystem. The result of their hard work is out there, with the most notable one being Arm64 support in the Linux kernel.
Alongside this launch, the organization is also restructuring. Going forward, it will operate both as the host of CoreCollective for open collaboration and as a fully commercial services provider for companies building products on Arm.
The consortium has launched with the following members:
| Column 1 | Column 2 |
|---|---|
| AMD | Ampere |
| Arm | Canonical |
| CIX Technology | Fujitsu |
| Graphcore | |
| Huawei | Linaro |
| Microsoft | Qualcomm |
| Red Hat | Samsung |
| SUSE |
Speaking on this, Li Gong, the CEO of Linaro, stated that:
As the ecosystem expands, we must scale our impact. CoreCollective with Arm’s backing removes the financial barrier to entry, making collaboration more inclusive, free and open to anyone to join and participate.
By running CoreCollective alongside Linaro’s commercial services, we can support more partners in the Arm ecosystem, be it through industry-wide cooperation or tailored, one-to-one service agreements.
If you were looking for the why, Arm's reach has expanded well past its mobile roots, now covering AI, cloud, edge, automotive, and client compute. That growth has brought significant software complexity with it, and no single company can maintain full enablement on its own.
A diverse group of industry players collaborating under one neutral structure should make it easier to address challenges that apply across the whole stack.
What Can We Expect?
CoreCollective operates through working groups, each focused on a specific part of the Arm software stack. Seven are confirmed at launch: Linux Fundamentals, Confidential Compute, Windows on Arm, Android, Edge Compute, Virtualization, and Data Center.
Members can propose new working groups at any time, and groups that wind down eventually get archived.
Of course, membership is free. Any company can join by filling out the CoreCollective Membership Agreement and sending it to the team for countersignature. There are three tiers here, General Members, Sponsoring Members, and Individual Members.
All code contributions must use an OSI-approved license with a Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off. Any contributed documentation material falls under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, with a Governing Board handling oversight, and a Technical Advisory Committee managing working groups.
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