The OpenPOWER Foundation is a neutral hub for open developer collaboration on the POWER architecture — lowering barriers to innovation and enabling the full hardware and software stack to be built openly.
The OpenPOWER Foundation is the catalyst for technical collaboration — fostering complete openness, accelerating innovation and driving resilience across the industry. By combining a 20-year history of hardware and software expertise with a completely open ecosystem, the OpenPOWER Foundation is the only organization equipped with deep institutional knowledge and a straightforward approach to innovation.
The POWER architecture's openness is structural, not aspirational. These aren't marketing claims — they're the legal and technical foundations that make sovereign computing possible.
Any OpenPOWER Foundation member organisation that designs a POWER ISA-compliant processor receives full patent coverage from IBM. This removes the single biggest legal risk from custom silicon development — your team can focus on innovation, not legal exposure.
The POWER ISA specification is published and available to all under the Apache 2.0 license — royalty-free, with no per-unit fees and no approval required to implement. Any OpenPOWER member can design a compliant processor, build products, or audit the full specification freely.
POWER ISA — the current specification — is published and available to all. No per-unit royalties. No licensing agreements required to read the spec, implement it, or build products based on it.
From BIOS to BMC, the entire firmware stack can be open and auditable. LibreBMC (Kestrel, ArcticTern), skiboot/OPAL, and the A2O core — being updated to POWER ISA compliance with POWER Commons and LibrePOWER — give organisations full visibility into every layer.
The entire semiconductor industry — from global organizations to individual creators — can innovate with choice across the full hardware and software stack, including IBM patent coverage for processor designers.
From ISA specification to firmware to OS to runtime — every layer of the POWER stack can be open, auditable, and verifiable. No hidden blobs, no closed bootloaders.
As a nonprofit organization, the OpenPOWER Foundation operates in the public interest, ensuring our work benefits the entire open computing ecosystem.
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