The Portland Project is an initiative by freedesktop.org aiming at easing the portability of application software between desktop environments and kernels by designing cross-platform APIs and offering implementations thereof as libraries to independent software vendors (ISVs). The project was taken to establish a greater foothold of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems in the desktop market. It aims at resolving a number of key factors that are believed to reduce the adoption rate of Linux distributions as operating system of choice for desktop computers at home or in the office.