Big players like IBM, HP, Cisco and Intel are teaming up with Universities and various institutions in an effort to further promote research and development for open source software of all sorts. The goals are pretty clear, and it's in the best interest of these companies to do such as they all make heavy use of open source products. Many of these companies are big contributors to open source, and are committed to providing technology they develop as a whole free of charge to the community as a whole, something that should improve the state and quality of various projects all over the world. It is good to see enterprise-class companies supporting open source, whether or not it is for their own good.