Japanese Linux firm Turbolinux, a founder of the UnitedLinux group and provider of one of the most widely-used Linux distributions in Asia, Wednesday added its support to the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) consortium.

OSDL is a non-profit consortium of IT industry leaders dedicated to furthering the growth and adoption of Linux in the enterprise. The addition of Turbolinux -- which helped drive the development of double-byte character support for Linux -- to its member companies strengthens OSDL's bid to become one of the guiding bodies behind the development of enterprise Linux, adding expertise in the Japanese and Asian markets.

"With Turbolinux joining OSDL, we have assembled almost all the world's leading Linux distributions serving every geographic market," Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL, said in a statement. "Their technical expertise in Asian language support, enterprise focus and local market experiences are important additions to the Lab's membership, and we look forward to their contributions to our Linux initiatives in Japan and Asia."

Koichi Yano, president and COO of Turbolinux, echoed Cohen's sentiments. "Turbolinux, from the beginning, has driven the use of Linux in Asia, making major open-source contributions to improve the software for use by corporations and government agencies. In fact, we just had a customer win with Carrier Grade Linux technology on Turbolinux in China. We look forward to working closely with OSDL to advance the Linux operating system globally, as well as in Japan, China and other key Asian markets."

OSDL's members already include Alcatel, Cisco, Computer Associates, Dell, Ericsson, Force Computers, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Linuxcare, Miracle Linux Corp., Mitsubishi Electric, MontaVista Software, NEC, Nokia, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, SuSE, TimeSys, Toshiba, Transmeta, Ulticom, Unilever and VA Software.

In past months, the consortium has been adding to its credibility in the Linux community. In June, Linux creator and development kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds left his position at Transmeta to work on the Linux kernel full-time at OSDL.

OSDL is sponsoring him to work exclusively on leading the development of Linux, guiding a team of thousands of developers around the world.

Shortly afterward, in July, OSDL announced that it was bringing Andrew Morton, one of Torvalds' chief lieutenants and maintainer of the stable Linux kernel, on board as well.

Under an agreement between OSDL and Digeo, where Morton serves as principle engineer and senior architect of the firm's Linux efforts, OSDL is supporting Morton's role as maintainer of the stable Linux kernel while he continues in his official role at Digeo.