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"We're excited to formalize our work with these innovators and to hear from them during this week's LinuxCon and CloudOpen event," Linux Foundation Vice President of Marketing and Developer Services Amanda McPherson said in a statement.

Twitter's infrastructure depends heavily on Linux to handle the enormous flood of data -- 400 million tweets per day, from 140 million active users -- constantly moving through the system, according to Twitter manager Chris Aniszczyk.

"Linux and its ability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure. By joining The Linux Foundation we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter," he said.

The Foundation says that a formal announcement will be made on Tuesday.