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Major Telco Providers Form Open Source Alliance
An anonymous reader writes "Several major telecom companies have come together to form a new alliance. Founded January 1, 2006 by Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens, "SCOPE", is helping to promote the availability of open carrier grade base platforms based on Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) hardware / software and Free Open Source Software (FOSS) building blocks, and to promote interoperability to better serve Service Providers and consumers. " It's worth noting that a number of these companies have also been OSDL members, pursuing the same agenda.
I'd be willing to bet they've been using OSS for a while now...
Show me packet captures and log entires, or it never happened.
Consipicuously absent are any wire-based telcos; without them, there's little chance of this going anywhere.
Is this the final push for Linux in Phones (smart or not)?
"SCOPE will focus on existing open specifications it believes best meets the needs of Service Providers."
...never mind.
Why does that scare me?
"SCOPE will not create specifications, but it will establish profiles"
"What is a profile?
A profile is a subset of the already existing specification from the standardization bodies
like PIGMG, OSDL, SA Forum and others. This subset - or profile - reflects the technical
requirements regarding the interfaces and building blocks to form a Carrier Grade Base
Platform to meet the Service Providers' requirements."
So they are going to cherry pick what they feel is the compliment of standards to clump together?
Why does that scare me?
"It will leverage the extensive
mutual membership between SCOPE and other related organizations."
Why does that
"Gap analysis: If the previous requirement analysis points out missing options or features,
they are documented and individual member companies work with specification
organizations to address these gaps."
ok..that sounds good.
"If SCOPE didn't exist, what would the impact be on COTS adoption in the carrier Grade
Platform space?
SCOPE provides guidance to the ecosystem without which the COTS adoption of Carrier
Grade Platform standards and specifications would be a slower process.
SCOPE considers all relevant standards and specifications in a Carrier Grade Platform
context and will identify any gap, promote and enable consistency across all relevant
standards and specifications.
Due to the richness and flexibility of existing standards and specifications, the market would
likely be fragmented and the advantages of economies of scale would be lost."
This should have been in the main body of the story.
It seems more to the point.
Hope this new collaboration is a good thing for consumers.
Hell has a road paved with good intentions.
AFAIK none of these companies are telcos, but rather telecom equipment manufacturers.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Ericsson already has a history of providing open source. See Erlang Does anyone know of open source solutions that the other companies provide?
Let's think about it. If a couple hundred large companies put 100K (the amount they give the Chamber of Commerce for lobbying efforts) into a pot to use to make improvements to OpenOffice. That would be enough to make the changes in OpenOffice most benefical to business. The 100K the donor companies put up is chump change compared to what they spend on license fees for Office. OpenOffice is not an unknown quantity. They'd be starting with a product that's 90% ready to go.
Certainly some companies and individuals are going to freeload and not contribute to the collective development, but it doesn't matter. Everyone, except Microsoft, wins.
The same logic applies to the operating system. Thousands and thousands of companies all paying individually for a software product that does the same thing is economic insanity. We're not talking about cars with large overhead costs in parts, it's software that runs on the hardware everyone already has.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Alcatel: The parent company is based out of France, with close ties to the government. Probably pro-open source.
Ericsson: Sony owns them. This won't last. Sure, they've got a good track record, but...
Motorola: they're in it to make money, acquiring open source companies and selling linux-based phones.
NEC: They jumped on Itanium for their cluster platform, so they joined OSDL two years ago, probably to make sure their investment paid off.
Siemens: Just barely joined the OSDL. Siemens Communications is primarily a hardware company; from my POV they're just trying to push their profit margin.
Nokia: they seem pretty secure as a cell phone company; I think they're into OSS genuinely to benefit the community. Take a look at what they're Open Sourcing.
Their contributions to open source notwithstanding, it looks like they want to:
1. Form alliance, apply magic words "Open Source"
2. Post article on slashdot, improve public image
3. Wait for OSS community to write their software
4. Sell COTS hardware to upgrade cell networks
5. Profit!
Of course, maybe they're working on Carrier Grade Linux just so they don't have to buy Micro$oft products any more.
http://unixguru.com/
go ahead and check it out.
One company did say "yes". They won the contract, probably for a lot of other reasons, as they were ahead of the curve in a lot of ways.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
WTF is a Telco Provider? I think I know what a Telco is, and I'm pretty sure I know what a provider is, but the article is about "Network Equipment Providers" (FTFA).
Translated directly, that can mean only one thing... This is an alliance of companies that manufacture other companies! Maybe according to a request sheet too.
Employees:
[ ]5000-10000
[ ]10000-50000
[ ]50000-100000
[ ]100000+
CEO Characteristics:
[ ]Manageable
[ ]Hyperactive
[ ]Steve Ballmer
Marketing Department:
[ ]Too large
[ ]Overflowing
[ ]Largest ever
[ ]RIAA
and so on... that'd be fun! I wonder how much they charge per telco.
StrayByte.Net
Ericsson: Sony owns them.
Sony Ericsson is a joint venture between Sony and Ericsson which are separate entities (think about MSNBC -- NBC and M$ are independent but got together and made something, well, crappy)
...and SonyEricsson make handsets rather than CO equipment in any case.
When Clinton lied, millions of sperm died! I bet he is a secret OSS user, too!
This looks to be a step for the telcom providers to give themselves some direction to move into, now that their ability to extract profits from providing a dying service is coming to a close.
I've seen so many great products that will come to the market in the next 6-18 months that can replace your cell phone (which replaced my landline). Most utilize WiFi to communicate with others inside and outside of the network. PocketSkype sorta deal.
Will this replace anyone soon? Probably not. I do believe the fight to regulate the Internet will come directly out of two things: "lost" sales tax revenue, and lost POTS business. If the 'net can get past both of these, we'll see some amazing communications devices released, and we can only hope to see the wasted spectrum of cell phones (and TV and radio) gives up for a more unregulated WiFi-style spectrum to utilize more efficiently.
In my "investigations" I believe T-Mobile will be the first to release a product that could be considered a knife in their own back: the multi-band GSM/WiFi cell phone that actually transitions cell calls to VoIP automatically. They've been investigating it for years and were ahead of most other providers in offering large companies with no T-Mobile signal a chance to set up an IP-based repeater.
Open source is a must-have for the telcos. If they can feel their death is imminent (say, 10-20 years), the best thing they can do to all their 100 years of proprietary architecture is to dump it, transition to open source APIs and software, and be ahead of the pack in making the transition to communications-via-IP. This will kill off the possibility of anyone trying to resurrect the old way.
I don't think the open source push is being performed for the user's interests, but I do think it will bring unintended consequences for the communications cartels. I can't wait to see how we're communicating in 10 years -- just 10 years ago I remember paying up to 20-40 cents a minute for an in-state (out of area) call.
Isn't he Cmdr. Taco's ranking officer?
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
> Why does that scare me?
> Why does that scare me?
Seriously, why should the actions of other open source users scare you? They can't take away the OSS you already use. They can't stop other projects working around them, or integrating their contributions into other tools. The OSS that benefits the rest of us will go on. Probably the resources available to a few projects will change; some might even fork -- but that's not something I'd call 'scary'.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/48358.html Motorola is no stranger to OS Just a few days ago they bought an open source IPTV set top manufacturer. Motorola (NYSE: MOT) on Tuesday announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire a Swedish developer of Internet protocol-based digital set-top boxes. Motorola will purchase open-source technology vendor Kreatel Communications, which provides a combination of set-top boxes, software and professional services aimed at offering stable and future-proof solutions for television services, namely, IPTV. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. See the linked article for more
It's important to note that the "solutions" they propose here include non-Free, off-the-shelf software. Sony would probably be fine with this, as long as their precious ringtones are encrypted with some DRM program. They probably couldn't care less if the kernel is Linux, or the webserver runs Apache.
Lucent, the bleeding sphincter of quality. Will someone shoot Patty, and set that company right already?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The telecoms seem to want to evolve Linux in the direction of Solaris, which has traditionally been the platform of choice for many of these apps. Lots of it is realtime stuff - robust mutexes, priority inheritance, NPTL, reliable RT scheduling, fully preemptible kernel, etc which also benefit multimedia and games.
Recently Linux has become a better soft RT platform than Windows and is creeping up on OSX, Irix, and Solaris.
I wonder how much of Evan Brown's (unixguru) brain Alcatel is bringing or helping being brought to that O/S table...
Please, don't slash unixguru's site; instead, visit alcatel for any apologies they MAY have posted about him....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
So now they think open source will save them where the lawyers failed?
What wonderful words
open carrier - cant affort to do it in house - lets spread the risk.
building blocks - hack and patch the real old stuff, sell it back as new.
interoperability - when it falls over we can blame the others.
consumers - they get write code, debug and pay.
What happened to the good old days?
Roll it out first, fast and faulty.
Lock the others out and let the cash flow in.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Now if only Nokia would privide linux driver support (or at least technical documentation) for their USB sync cables. Being able to send text messages via a nokia phone from linux would be very handy.
Is this the same Nokia that is pushing hard for software patents?
..."
Software patents held by Nokia
Nokia has over 70% of Finnish software patents
Nokia argues that software patents "provide incentives to undertake research and development in Europe,
How does Nokia reconcile open source with software patents?
no mention of how most of this lot want to introduce software patents in Europe. Screw them.
This will mean very little in the long run as long as there is a strangle hold simple specifications such as Standard EMI Messaging. EMI Format
Equipment vendors produce equipment, and then software that can be used to managed/configure it remotely.
You can telnet to the devices in your network, but it's completely impractical for a large number of tasks. For this reason the vendors produce NMS (Network Management Systems) that provide a GUI and interfaces to control the devices en-mass.
Now the problem with this is that it just manages some equipment from one vendor - you're pretty much locked in. You could buy another makers kit, but then you have to run two NMS and most likely buy a solution that sits over the top of them. It's not even just configuring the kit, it's managing alarms, capacity and even just seeing what's connected to what.
Previously in the good times, vendors were happy with this situation - their customers were locked in and they just sold more and more of the same kit without much in the way of reductions - they knew the customers only other choice was to stump up a huge amount to bring in another vendor.
Now times are a bit hard. You want to sell your new bit of kit and people just aren't interested - it's nothing personal, it just costs more to get it into your network than it's going to bring in.
Hence these OSS initiatives. If common and open protocols can be developed across the equipment from these vendors then it just makes everybody's life simpler/cheaper. Telco doesn't have to spend vast sums on managing network and can go with the best vendor for the job. The vendors can sell to customers who previously locked them out, reduce the expense of maintaining an NMS and benefit from customers who now have more cash to spend.
The vendors that don't get involved are those with the most to lose. Makers of old legacy systems which can easily be replaced by some new upstart (e.g. HuaWei).
This may well be in response to GPL 3, which, among other things, is intended to tighten the rules involving the mix of GPL and proprietary software as well as forbidding DRM. With the telcos interested in selling ring tones and music downloads posessing DRM, as well as combining Linux with the other proprietary stuff that makes up a mobile phone, they may be planning to create a GPL-2 fork of Linx in an effort to continue to use it in their products.
The creation of an open source allience would make perfect sense in that case.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
This is just another case of corporate greed. These companies are wanting to exploit the good work of thousands of dedicated free software developers so they can sell more hardware to more customers wanting something to run all these new innovative applications on.
Oh wait ... this is a good thing! I guess greed directed the right way can work wonders.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...to say that oss are quite often used a development platforms, but rarely in the boxes themselves. Asterisk is the first real oss alternative in commutation, as to Transmission systems, they run on rt-os'es which are NOT linux ( though i've heard of some initiatives to build boxes on rt-linux). I have seen soho access products which are basically linux-in-a-box, ditto set top boxes, but that ain't where the money is in telco's.
Not actually checked the box and manual for an "offer" on paper, but it's all detailed under the "About" section of my Series 60-based handset and the "offer" is there and details where the code can be downloaded from. It even mentions that you can purchase it on CD-ROM for the cost of providing it (as specified in the GPL).
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