More than a decade after initially pledging to invest $1 billion in Linux, IBM has announced it will invest another $1 billion in improving the operating system on its Power Systems. IBM initially began talking about investing heavily in Linux in 1999 and formally announced the earlier $1 billion figure and began investing in 2000.

Announced at LinuxCon 2013, IBM's latest $1 billion pledge aims to help clients capitalize on big data and cloud computing with modern systems built to handle the new wave of applications coming to the data center in the post-PC era. Two immediate initiatives that IBM announced—a new client center in Europe and a Linux on Power development cloud—focus on rapidly expanding the company's growing ecosystem supporting Linux on Power Systems, which today represent more than 400 independent software vendors (ISVs) with more than 1,000 applications, as well as more than 2,500 open-source applications worldwide.

This eWEEK slide show looks at how IBM has been involved with Linux over the years.