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.

Comments

it is about time they admitted they use OSS stuff

[linuxwebadmin]

I'd be willing to bet they've been using OSS for a while now...

Missing someone?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Consipicuously absent are any wire-based telcos; without them, there's little chance of this going anywhere.

Re:Missing someone?

[NoMaster]

Consipicuously absent are any wire-based telcos; without them, there's little chance of this going anywhere.

Telco Providers .

Alcatel & Ericsson are the major hardware providers outside of North America, with a complete range of wire, mobile, and wireless hardware. NEC & Siemens too, with a smaller presence. Motorola do lot of radio/wireless/mobile stuff, and Nokia do mainly mobiles.

What's interesting is the non-appearance of North American hardware vendors, like Nortel, on the list.

Push for Linux on Phones?

[feranick]

Is this the final push for Linux in Phones (smart or not)?

Is this a good thing?

[qualico]

"SCOPE will focus on existing open specifications it believes best meets the needs of Service Providers."

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 ...never mind.

"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.

Game theory in operation

[HangingChad]

Cooperate for the benefit of all, then compete for your share. I'm not surprised the telcos are doing it, I'm surprised more companies aren't doing it.

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.

What a Change a Few Years Makes

[mkcmkc]

About six or seven years ago I was the technical lead working on a million-dollar contract for a major telecom company. I made a point to ask each company whether they would make their source code available to us, or at least allow us to look at it--not exactly Open Source, but as much as I could do at the time. Most of the companies acted as if I'd ask them to suck a turd through a straw.

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.

Telcom providers getting outsourced, too

[dada21]

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.

Re:it is about time they admitted they use OSS stu

[aliscool]

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

Kernel development

[B1gP4P4Smurf]

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.

Re:Ericsson Erlang Open Source

[p0ppe]

Nokia has released quite a few open source projects. See http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/

GPL 3.0

[Prototerm]

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.