The end of OzLabs

[Posted January 19, 2026 by corbet]

OzLabs is a collection of Australian free-software developers that was, for most of its history, associated with IBM. Members of OzLabs have included Hugh Blemings, Michael Ellerman, Ben Herrenschmidt, Greg Lehey, Paul Mackerras, Martin Pool, Stephen Rothwell, Rusty Russell, and Andrew Tridgell, among others. The OzLabs "about" page notes that, as of January 2026, the last remaining OzLabs members have departed IBM. "This brought to a close the Ozlabs association with IBM". Thus ends a quarter-century of development history.

(Thanks to Jon Masters).

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really the end?

Posted Jan 19, 2026 22:11 UTC (Mon) by slrtbtfs (subscriber, #133361) [Link] (1 responses)

Am I understanding the situation wrong here or is the headline somewhat misleading and ozlabs continues to exists, just not in a way that is associated with IBM?

really the end?

Posted Jan 19, 2026 22:17 UTC (Mon) by ruscur (guest, #104891) [Link]

It's still a community but not an engineering team. There are still some OzLabbers that share a common employer, though it's pretty spread out. Quite a few are at Nvidia and Tenstorrent

"we are not dead"

Posted Jan 20, 2026 11:49 UTC (Tue) by sfr (subscriber, #7761) [Link] (2 responses)

(apologies to Monty Python)

:-)

"we are not dead"

Posted Jan 20, 2026 13:08 UTC (Tue) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

You're not fooling anyone, Stephen.

"we are not dead"

Posted Jan 20, 2026 14:52 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]

Ah, so more an anarcho-syndicalist commune?

I was lucky enough to visit OzLabs back in the mid 2000s when the HPC centre I was at was getting an IBM OpenPOWER 720 cluster. Nice bunch of people and fortunate to keep up that contact with some after their OzLabs time (especially working with Mark Nelson when he came down to my next gig at VLSCI to be part of the IBM contingent based with us).

Vale Chris Yeoh too. :-(