Open source

The name “open source” was introduced in 1998 and since then its influence has grown many times and spread across several industries. The dot–com era in the late 1990’s made open source code popular.

Later, many leading operating systems both for desktops and mobile phones became prominent such as Linux and Android. From the operating systems, open source has gained momentum and now impacts all layers of the networking stack starting from user plane all the way to the application layer, thereby increasingly influencing telecom and enterprise networks.

Currently, open source code enriches the infrastructure platform, virtualization, micro services, containers, controllers, orchestration, AI/ML, policy, and application layers. Open source has also moved from only providing code to individual modules to influencing the overall network architecture, thus becoming a force on par with standardization.

Ericsson is one of the leading promoters and supporters of the open source eco system accelerating the adoption and industry alignment in a number of key technology areas including Automation, Orchestration, Edge compute, NFVI, NFV, AI/ML, containers and micro services to benefit customers and partners.

As part of Ericsson’s collaboration and deep involvement in many open source projects, we are contributing and supporting the Technical Advisory Council (TAC), Marketing outreach committees & industry elect chair roles and Technical steering Committee & chair roles in the evolution and adoption of open source projects. In addition, Ericsson Software Technology (EST) teams are involved in writing & committing code, as well as reviewing and in other ways improving the usability and quality of the implementation.

Read about Ericsson’s latest alliance with ORAN where the focus will be around AI and automation.

Ericsson sees automation, virtualization, orchestration and other open source empowered technologies playing vital roles in the successful implementation of of 5G networks.

Over time, Ericsson has donated new projects to open source, Erlang perhaps the most notable, but OpenwebRTC, Titan, and OpenSAF are other examples where we have taken lead, just to mention a few.

Ericsson is a founding member of Linux foundation networking Fund (LFN) that drives many open source networking projects, as of now, includes the ONAP, ODL, OPNFV, FD-io, SNAS, PNDA and Tungsten fabric projects and we contribute to several of these projects. Ericsson is also member and contributor to the Openstack, CNCF and LF Edge that includes Akraino project.