When you take a look at the The OpenStand Principles, it’s clear that they work towards and embrace openness, transparency, cooperation, and voluntary adoption. Those qualities align nicely with the concepts in the open source community. A major player in the open source community, The Linux Foundation, provides tools, training, and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. As such, they are entering a new phase in their organization’s open source networking initiatives with the goal to to “foster Open Source Networking innovation in the entire ecosystem.”

In a webinar titled “Open Source Networking and Orchestration: From Proof of Concept to Production” Arpit Joshipura, The Linux Foundation’s General Manager of Networking and Orchestration, commented that The Linux Foundation “is creating the greatest shared technology investment in history” and that The Linux Foundation is the leader in building open source ecosystems “that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption.”

To that end, he announced Linux’s third phase of open networking and orchestration. “Phase 1 was the disaggregation of network components and was characterized by trials and proofs-of-concept (POC). Phase two introduced production-ready components and was characterized by initial deployments. This new third phase is production-ready, end-to-end solutions with harmonization being the key difference. The key message being that open networking is now ready to move out of the lab and beyond field trials to real production networks. It ensures the technology in question can work in real end-to-end deployment scenarios.”

During this webinar, Joshipura also introduced a new project the Linux Foundation is taking on –

the new Linux Foundation Open Source Framework and Architecture – also called The Whole Stack Open Source Building Blocks.

“With this disaggregation and multiple options at every level of  integration, end-to-end testing and thus harmonization become critical success factors.  While this new model gives enterprises and service providers choices at each layer it also adds integration complexities.” As part of this third phase, along with the Open Source Framework and Architecture, deployment barriers will be removed and the time required for deployments will be expedited.

How should open standards players embrace and accommodate open source development?