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By John G. Spooner, 17 June 2003 16:50

NEWS Linus Torvalds has been lured away from Transmeta to work full-time on his first love Linux. The creator of the freely available Linux operating system will join the Open Source Development Lab, a consortium designed to bring high-end features to the software. Torvalds, who will become an OSDL Fellow, will go to work full-time on future versions of Linux, such as its forthcoming 2.6 kernel, the OSDL said in a statement. Torvalds said in a statement: "It feels a bit strange to finally officially work on what I've been doing for the last 12 years, but with the upcoming 2.6.x release it makes sense to be able to concentrate fully on Linux. OSDL is the perfect setting for vendor-independent and neutral Linux development." Torvalds will join OSDL on a leave from his position as a Transmeta technical fellow, where he has been working on research projects. Torvalds was originally hired to help the chipmaker launch its Crusoe processor. The transition for Torvalds comes at a tumultuous time for Linux. The operating system continues to ride a wave of popularity, especially among businesses, but it also has become embroiled in legal challenges from SCO Group. In the latest twist in the legal saga, SCO on Monday claimed in a $3bn (£1.78bn) lawsuit against IBM that significant portions of the operating system use proprietary Unix code, violating SCO's copyrights. Torvalds is expected to help the OSDL work toward its original mission. The consortium was founded in August 2000 by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM and NEC to help create and test new business-oriented features for Linux, such as the ability to run on multiple processors. It operates two data centres for testing software features and also has alliances with commercial sellers of Linux, including Red Hat and SuSE.