Five New Members; Now 22 Industry Leaders Aligned to Guide Linux Development
LINUXWORLD, Jan. 30, 2002 - Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), together with industry leaders and open source community members, today announced the creation of technical working groups to develop feature roadmaps to enable Linux for the enterprise and telecommunications market segments. Also announced today are five new OSDL members - Alcatel, Cisco, MontaVista Software, Nokia and Toshiba. To better position Linux for carrier grade and data center usage, OSDL has moved beyond hardware support of enterprise Linux projects. With the new working groups, it now provides a forum for creating vision and guidance to enhance Linux to meet the needs of both the data center and carrier grade market segments. "Nokia expects that this industry initiative will promote an ecosystem of focused Linux enterprises. This will enable us to more proactively develop networked product-creation capacity by working more closely with such category leaders. We consistently support open architectures," said Ari Virtanen, vice president, Nokia Networks. "Since Linux will be the basis for our next generation All-IP network infrastructure, we want to ensure that Linux continues to support efficiently and in a uniform way the features required in carrier grade environments."Defining Working Group Goals
Initial industry participants in the Carrier Grade Linux Working Group are Alcatel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, Intel, MontaVista Software, Nokia, Red Hat and SuSE. The working group, in conjunction with the open source community, will concentrate on collecting requirements and specifying the architecture of the carrier grade Linux platform. The working group also encourages the development of commercial and open standard components on top of Linux to implement the required functionality of the platform. The main working areas include service availability, architecture, validation and requirements. Founded in August 2000 to focus on Linux for the enterprise, OSDL will continue to build on this already established program with a newly defined Data Center Linux Working Group. A primary goal of both Linux working groups is to achieve consistency across Linux distributions by working closely with the Linux developer community and industry groups such as the Free Standards Group. In addition, by incorporating advanced Linux functionality into their standard definition, the working groups enable a viable market and third-party ecosystem for carrier grade Linux and data center Linux distributions. The creation of these working groups dramatically expands the possibility of applying commercial off-the-shelf software and hardware to carrier grade environments and enterprise data centers. "Customers want choice when making technical decisions about evolving their infrastructure," said Ross Mauri, president of OSDL, and vice president, eServer Development, IBM. "Customers will now have the choice of industry standards-based solutions as a welcome alternative to proprietary offerings. This provides flexibility and solutions for reduced development time and cost."About the Open Source Development Lab
Supported by a global consortium of industry leaders, the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) is an independent, vendor-neutral, non-profit organization dedicated to enabling and guiding Linux and Linux-based development for enterprise and carrier grade functionality worldwide. Headquartered outside Portland, Oregon, OSDL fulfills a critical need in the open source development community to have access to the high-end hardware for programming and testing. The 22 industry leaders who are members of OSDL include Alcatel, Caldera, Cisco, Computer Associates, Covalent, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard Company, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Linuxcare, Miracle Linux Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric, MontaVista Software, NEC Corporation, Nokia, Red Hat, SuSE, Toshiba, Turbolinux and VA Software. More information on OSDL or the Carrier Grade Linux and Data Center Linux Working Groups is available at http://www.osdl.org/. See OSDL at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo at the OSDL Booth 9.org in the Pavilion at the Jacob Javits Center, New York, New York.Quotes
Alcatel
"Alcatel provides end-to-end solutions requiring the integration of a wide variety of technologies. Linux as a de-facto operating system standard becomes a natural candidate as part of the underlying platform to streamline this integration. This would result in a more homogeneous end-to-end solution," said Martin De Prycker, chief technology officer, Alcatel. "Our customers expect robust and reliable solutions with high availability. Any software component used in Alcatel's products must match stringent requirements. We are confident that the Carrier Grade Linux initiative will deliver a stabilized and hardened Linux at the level we expect for our operating system platforms."Cisco
"Cisco is committed to advancing technology in support of our customers, and to open standards," said Michael Frendo, vice president, Voice Technology Group, Cisco Systems, Inc. "We are very pleased to join with other industry leaders as a member of OSDL's new Carrier Grade Linux Working Group, with the objective of accelerating the availability and consistency of open platforms tailored for service provider needs. service providers as well as developers will be able to use these platforms to create and deliver next-generation services."Hewlett-Packard Company
"As a sponsoring member of OSDL, HP is committed to driving an open architecture for the Internet infrastructure and the telecommunications environment," said Martin Fink, general manager, HP Linux Systems Operation. "The roadmap and architecture that will come from OSDL's working group will offer our customers reduced risk and accelerate the adoption of Linux for carrier grade applications."IBM
"Today's announcement provides a unique opportunity for our telecommunications customers to reduce costs and improve return on investment by moving to Linux," said Ross Mauri, president of OSDL and vice president, eServer development, IBM. "IBM's participation in the OSDL Carrier Grade Working Group reinforces our commitment to offer Linux-based solutions that meet the stringent requirements of the core network infrastructure for telecommunications customers."Intel
"The new working group highlights the momentum behind using industry-standard building blocks in the communication industry," said Scott Richardson, general manager, Network Processing Group, Intel. "With this focus, Intel and other industry leaders will be working with OSDL to enable lower costs and rapid deployment of innovative new services in communications."MontaVista Software
"MontaVista Software strongly endorses this initiative," said Jim Ready, CEO and president, MontaVista Software. "We believe that Linux promises telecommunications vendors the ability to better compete in today's market through faster time-to-market and lower costs. MontaVista has been providing Linux leadership in the high-availability area and we look forward to contributing to this standards-based, open architecture initiative."Red Hat
"We are seeing global interest and adoption in the migration from proprietary Unix systems to Red Hat Linux, and the telecommunications industry is one of the leaders of this larger trend," said Michael Evans, vice president business development, Red Hat. "We are pleased to join this working group of other companies in the technology industry to support this initiative."SuSE Linux
"Hardly any sector was and is still marked with so much technical progress as the telecommunications industry. Only those companies who make use of an open and flexible technical basis are able to rapidly transform innovations into opportunities and prevail in the market on the long term," said Jurgen Geck, vice president, Technology Partners, SuSE Linux. "SuSE welcomes the newly launched initiative for the establishment of open Linux standards for the telecommunications sectors. This will further accelerate the march of Linux in this pro-innovation sector."