The Linux Foundation has launched a new effort to promote collaboration between open source networking projects.
The foundation this week unveiled the LF Networking Fund, which Arpit Joshipura described as a “platform for cross-project collaboration”.
“LFN will form the basis of collaboration across the network stack, from the data plane into the control plane, to orchestration, automation, end-to-end testing, and more,” Joshipura, GM networking and orchestration at the Linux Foundation, wrote in a blog entry.
The aim is to “raise, budget and spend funds and coordinate support for open source and/or open specification projects involved with the movement or communication of data on a network (including, but not limited to, data plane, control plane, analytics, orchestration, and automation technologies for enterprise, cloud, and carrier networks),” according to the LNF charter
The new initiative brings together 83 organisations and includes participation from nine of the top 10 open source networking projects and the majority of the top 10 networking and enterprise vendors, according to Joshipura. LFN’s carrier members represent 60 per cent of the world’s mobile subscribers.
Projects that join LFN will maintain their technical independence and release roadmaps but will share staff and financial resources via a unified governing board.
FD.io, OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, PNDA.io and SNAS are all LFN founding projects.
“What we can expect to see under this shared governance model is increased community collaboration focused on building a shared technical investment (without risk of fragmentation), while also providing space for inter-project architectural dependencies to flourish (e.g., multi-VIM collaboration, VNF onboarding, etc.),” Joshipura wrote.
“In addition, LFN enhances operational efficiency among existing communities by enabling projects to share development and deployment best practices and resources such as test infrastructure, and to collaborate on everything from architectural integration to industry event participation.”
Australian cloud services provider Aptira has signed on as a gold sponsor of LNF.