NTT Joins OSDL

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."

Comments

Reflects NTT's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

NTT joining OSDL

[Alapan]

Note it says "possibly". Also, Linux migration is going to take a long time, and they probably will support multiple operating systems anyway.

Re:NTT joining OSDL

[LuYu]

...they probably will support multiple operating systems anyway.

You say that as if it would only be good if the support were exclusive to Linux. As long as the support is not exclusive to MS, life is good. More mainstream support for Linux can only be a good thing.

Go Nihon!

[cgranade]

First, the Japanese gov't supports a Linux-based OS, now this. Gotta hand it to the Japanese! yokkatadesuyo!

Translation

[Leffe]

Here's the babelfish translation:

No wait, it's here.

Re:Translation

[Clowning]

Reading that gave me a feeling best described as motion-sickness.

Re:Translation

[Leffe]

Or better: The babelfish effect.

Having a fish swim up your ear can not be a very pleasant experience.

Re:Translation

[Xerithane]

Get out your katakana charts, kids, because Babelfish doesn't do it for you, ya' know!

The katakana in the article is "Linux", so everywhere you see non latin characters replace it with Linux.

P.S. How the hell do you type in Japanese on here? It works on Slashdot.jp, but it converts it to う or something.

NTT joins OSDL

[tandr]

... which is basically big "Fu.., sorry, Thank You, but No, thank you" to SCO even after memorable trip of McBride to Japan

Everything old is new again

[ekarjala]

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...

Memo

[grub]

From: Darl McBride

To: Renaissance Ventures

Subject: We have 'em on the run!

Did you hear that NTT joined with OSDL? They'll be working on our
Linux OS for all new projects! Obviously they have come to their
senses, email from "l337_d00dx0rzz@hotmail.com" said that NTT would
be sending us a large sum of money for licensing.

Darl

ps: we *could* use another $500 or $600K to make this month's payroll.

I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot needs to provide a list of corporations approved by the geek collective, so I can skip reading and get right to the knee-jerk reaction.

Re:I'm confused

[Xerithane]

Anything that has to do with Japan is cool.

Any company that is headquartered in Japan is approved and good.

If you see the text, "NTT" or "Japan" than you must have a positive knee-jerk reaction, and say things like, "The island of Japan is doing wonderful things to promote the open source initiative, and they truly grasp what open source is. As well as having hot (japanese school girls|blue or pink haired chicks|big robots!)

Re:Yeah, but...

[chill]

But why are there not any American telecoms...?

The American telecom equipment would be Lucent, Nortel, Juniper, Ciena and a couple of others. None are in a financial position to do anything. They're not investing in a lot of R&D at the moment other than continuing existing projects.

Lucent uses Sun Solaris and HP-UX for systems control, depending on which equipment you are talking about -- ATM/FR or DWDM/Sonet/SDH. There was a pilot program initiated about a year ago in partnership with IBM Global Services to test Linux out in certain situations. I have no idea where that is at right now.

Nortel uses Red Hat in some situations. Actually, so did Lucent. Check out the bullet points in http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press _Q12002.html

I've seen Red Hat boxes -- rows of them -- used in Verizon (Dell servers), AT&T, Williams Communications, Sprint and others.

Japanese site translated

[kyoko21]

You can read the translated Japanese site here.

An intelligent decision, but here's questions:

[192939495969798999]

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! :)

YES! Does this mean...

[pla]

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!

NTT's Plans: Good for Linux but Bad for Sun

[reporter]

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

Could save tons of money, but....

[addikt10]

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.