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NTT Joins OSDL

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the tiny-pink-phones-for-kernel-hackers? dept.

craigoda writes "NTT, the world's largest telecommunications company has joined the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) (Japanese) to focus on increasing the availability, clustering, and performance of Linux for use as the infrastructure OS in next generations telecommunications systems. NTT's work on Linux will be done through OSDL's Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) working group. Here is a Dow Jones Business story was released yesterday based on the rumour that NTT was joining. Looking at the OSDL web site, the rumour appears to be true."

6 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Reflects NTT's strategy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I used to work as consultant for NTT back in the mid-80s and they've always supported innovative strategies within the company. The folks at OSDL will be able to tap in large talent pool within the company.

    Which is nice.

  2. Everything old is new again by ekarjala · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Bell Labs develops UNIX as a development environment for next generation telecommunication systems. It grows to encompass a myriad of applications over the years. One day a bright young Finn hacks a derivative to run on commidity computing hardware. This derivative "Linux" is embraced first by hard core geeks for their own use (and as an expression of independence from various monolithic computing behemoths) and eventually, through the coding and evangelizing efforts of this user community, gains acceptance in enterprise level computing environments. Now NTT wants to use Linux as a platform for next generation data/telecomm applications...

  3. An intelligent decision, but here's questions: by 192939495969798999 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    1) What were the alternatives?

    2) How much money will this save? I imagine into the billions, especially if it extends to a US telecomm switch to Linux. This is just one more step to open-source acceptability! :)

    --
    stuff |
  4. YES! Does this mean... by pla · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This pleases me greatly. Does this mean we can expect to see NTT's TwinVQ (ie, VQF as popularized by the Yamaha encoder but technically belonging to NTT) made open source sometime in the near future?

    For those unaware of VQF, it performs noticeably better than MP3 at compressing audio (at 96Kbps, it perorms better than even MP3Pro, though takes about 10x as long to encode). For some reason (cough cough money cough) only a 96Kbps encoder ever made it out to the general public, but many people who used and loved it have long awaited a higher bitrate version.

    C'mon, NTT, you've got an otherwise dead and useless code base. Let us play!

  5. NTT's Plans: Good for Linux but Bad for Sun by reporter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Within Japan, NTT laboratories have the same respect (among researchers) that AT&T laboratories once had before the breakup of Ma Bell. NTT joining the Open Source Development Laboratory (OSDL) to develop Linux will surely help to raise Linux's visibility and acceptance among Japanese high-technology companies. Moreover, NTT's work aggressively developing Linux at the OSDL will help to ensure the ultimate failure of Chinese attempts to recruit Japanese and Korean researchers to build an independent operating system (OS) that is incompatible with Windows or Linux. Please read "Asian trio to replace Windows".

    Further, NTT joining the OSDL is extremely bad news for Sun Microsystems. NTT currently uses Solaris to run its group servers, but NTT is clearly committed to migrating all its servers from Solaris to Linux. NTT is the beginning of the Linux avalanche that will lock Sun computer systems out of the telecommunications market. (reference: " NTT Mulls Joining Global Consortium For Linux Development")

    ... from the desk of the reporter

  6. Could save tons of money, but.... by addikt10 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The cost of Sun's telco gear, with Vertas clustering and journalling software borders on insane for a large installation, so the long term economic benifits for NTT are obvious.

    However, in my experience, a company as large as NTT would have signed NDA's with both Sun and Veritas to see what was coming in the next releases of their software, and to provide input into the design features.

    I wonder if these agreements will allow NTT to do anything but help fund development of these features.