Open source

Ericsson has for a long time been promoting open standards and open systems. In the same spirit Ericsson also contributes to the open source community. For many years we have been an active participant in several open source communities as well as contributing whole projects to the communities. We do this because we se a benefit for us, our customers and our technology.

Here you will find some of our major contributions and ongoing activities as of today.

The Feldspar language (Functional Embedded Language for DSP and PARallelism) is the result of a joint effort between Ericsson, Chalmers University (Gothenburg, Sweden) and ELTE University (Budapest,  Hungary). It is a domain specific language with associated C code generator mainly targeting software for DSP processors.

Feldspar is a functional, implicitly parallel language that offers dramatic increase in productivity, while securing a high degree of portability of DSP-targeted software.

The language is under continuous development and the project is welcoming contributions from the open source community.

Sailfin is an open source Java Communications Application Server community project initiated by Ericsson and Sun. It is the first and so far only open source server that can provide both Sip Servlets and Java EE.

The Sailfin project, adds SIP Servlets technology extension to Glassfish providing performance, high availability, clustering features and integrating with the existing services. SailFin will be the source of all SIP related development for GlassFish.

The source code originates from the Ericsson Application Server. It has been used as a platform for various IMS and Multimedia products. Ericsson has been part of the JSR-116 defining the initial Sip Servlet standard that is now followed up by the JSR-289 version.

Ericsson adds engineering investments to the open source community in working towards achieving JSR-289 compatibility and adding telecoms properties to Java EE.

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OpenSAF is an open source project that implements a high availability base platform middleware consistent with Service Availability™ Forum (SA Forum™) specifications.
Ericsson is an initial supporter and sponsor and has contributed User Mode Linux (UML) support in OpenSAF.

Ericsson is today working with contributing implementation of three SA Forum™ services: Information Model Management (IMM), Notification (NTF) and Log.

These services constitute management infrastructure and, together with existing high availability services, provide complete base platform middleware. With these contributions Ericsson supports creation of COTS ecosystem for the telecommunications industry that will lower cost and improve service availability, enabling Ericsson to focus on value-added products and applications.

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The Transparent Inter-Process Communication (TIPC) protocol is specially designed for intra-cluster communication and has been used in Ericsson products for many years.

The protocol provides a number of features that make it highly suitable for communication in carrier-grade cluster platforms and applications.

These features include full location transparency, lightweight connections, reliable message delivery, a subscription service and high performance.

TIPC was originally developed as part of the Ericsson telecom server platform running on a proprietary operating-system kernel. It was later ported to Linux and turned into an open-source project and has since been ported to several other operating systems.

Today the protocol is part of the standard Linux kernel. TIPC in the Linux kernel is the de-facto reference implementation and the code base where 

Ericsson is actively taking part in the TIPC development.

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Erlang is a general-purpose programming language and runtime environment with built-in support for concurrency, distribution, fault tolerance and incremental code loading. Erlang is currently used in several Ericsson telecom infrastructure products.

Interest in Open Source Erlang is continually growing and there are now many commercial products built using it.

Examples of products from other vendors are: E-business solutions, Mobile positioning systems, Bank systems, Telephony Call Handling, Telephony signaling systems, Operation and Maintenance systems.

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