Press Releases

"MontaVista Software strongly endorses this initiative,” said Jim Ready, CEO and President, MontaVista Software. “We believe that Linux promises Telecom 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."

OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPMENT LAB EXPANDS SUPPORT OF CARRIER GRADE LINUX

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. 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 will concentrate on collecting requirements for, and working with the open source Linux community on 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, and 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. "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. Among the more than 20 industry leaders who are members of OSDL include Alcatel, Caldera, Cisco, Computer Associates, Covalent, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard Company, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Linuxcare, MontaVista Software, Miracle Linux Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric, 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 www.osdl.org.