Open source projects and telecom’s standards development organizations must work together to speed production of multi-vendor interoperability and automation for NFV and SDN, according to a Linux Foundation whitepaper released today. Such an effort requires close coordination, however, as well as a realization by each side of what it does best and careful attention to legal and intellectual property challenges.

The time is ripe for such an effort, because open source projects are proliferating as standalone projects, and need to be “better aligned with end users that maintain common technology stacks,” according to the whitepaper “Harmonizing Open Source and Standards in the Telecom World.”

It builds on a unified architecture presented by Arpit Joshipura, head of networking for the Linux Foundation, at the recent Open Network Summit. That aligned various open source groups with existing SDOs and also pointed to places where efforts overlapped or duplicated. One of the Linux Foundation goals for this year is “harmonizing” those open source efforts to eliminate duplication. (See Time for a Telecom Reboot.)

The unified architecture, shown below, is Joshipura’s effort since assuming his role in late 2016, to spell out where open source projects and SDOs fit together, as well as where they might overlap. That’s a first step, he says, educating the market about what a potentially confusing array of open source projects are addressing.

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