AT&T Open Sources Its SDN Framework To The Linux Foundation (fiercetelecom.com)

An anonymous reader writes "It's no secret that AT&T has been planning to move to a software-defined network for quite a while. Now, they've decided to open-source the whole thing." From Fierce Telecom: AT&T today announced it will release its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform to the wider telecom industry as an open source offering managed by the Linux Foundation. The goal, the company said, is to make ECOMP the telecom industry's standard automation platform for managing virtual network functions and other software-centric network capabilities.
AT&T delivered 8.5 million lines of code to the Linux Foundation on Wednesday, saying "We want to build a community -- where people contribute to the code base and advance the platform..." AT&T said Wednesday they've already received interest from other major telecoms, and "we want this to help align the global industry." While their ultimate goal is to virtualize 75% of their own network by 2020, at least one analyst sees a larger trend where the whole telecom industry collectively bypasses equipment vendors and begins "taking network innovation into its own hands."

Comments

AT&T delivered 8.5 million lines of code

[fustakrakich]

Oh, that's right! Drown 'em in paperwork.

Re:AT&T delivered 8.5 million lines of code

[Anonymous Coward]

What does it all do that it needs that many lines of code, anyway?

Same question goes for the linux kernel and a lot of other things, of course.

Re: AT&T delivered 8.5 million lines of code

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you aren't a programmer. Because if you were you would know.

Re:AT&T delivered 8.5 million lines of code

[fustakrakich]

What does it all do that it needs that many lines of code, anyway?

Well, I hope it can at least print "hello world" or display the time on the screen. Whatever it does, the kludge makes it look fat. I'll bet ya that if it were written in Assembly it would fit on a floppy

Re: AT&T delivered 8.5 million lines of code

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you aren't either. Because if you were, you could explain.

Confucius Say --

[Anonymous Coward]

"He who goes to bed with itchy butt wake up with smelly finger"

Why do companies do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it to get people to write code for them for free?

Re:Why do companies do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

And they do this so everyone has to change to their system instead of them changing to someone else's. NIH

Re:Why do companies do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T has a government granted monopoly on the communications backbone in the US. They have nothing to lose by doing this. Open sourcing will give hackers eager for recognition a chance to debug their code for free or next to nothing for AT&T.

So, no. Corporations never do anything for altruistic reasons, that would be at odds with extracting maximum profit from their customers.

Re: Why do companies do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a good point, but it's also important to realize that it isn't a zero sum game. AT&T can do something for purely selfish reasons that also happens to be beneficial to the public at large. They may or may not consider the good it does for others, but that doesn't mean there won't be any.

Re: Why do companies do this?

[The Other White Meat]

That hasn't been true since the 1970s.

Re: Why do companies do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the ATT descended from SBC, so the only thing that drives them is their profit:
if everyone used this same software infrastructure, ATT would sell backdoor, wiretapping, untraceable traces, I.e. evey bad thing that could be done with source code in hand, to this week's highest bidder.

But as a former employee, I might be a little bitter...

Re:Why do companies do this?

[Tailhook]

It makes the industry more liquid. The investors that hold these companies don't just hold AT&T. They also invest in Verizon and Deutsche Telekom and a plethora of smaller telecoms. The more standardized the systems are among these companies the easier it is to merge and consolidate them. That has real value for major share holders. The end state for a successful telecom company is getting bought by some politically connected monster.

License?

[willoughby]

What license is it released under?

Re:License?

[fustakrakich]

Your guess is as good as mine.. Can it be more ambiguous?

AT&T is currently working with the Linux Foundation on the structure for this open source initiative.

Re:License?

[Anonymous Coward]

What license is it released under?

I imagine it'll be something that doesn't include patent grants, or if it does include patent grants, the owner and distributor won't be AT&T.

Re:License?

[HiThere]

An excellent question. If AT&T has any sense it's the GPL, as it retains ownership of the copyright, but the article didn't even use the word license.

That said, I believe that the "Linux Foundation" is an association of companies with no community representatives. They often makes statements that try to convince people that the Linux community feels in some particular way, but it's frequently a way that only benefits the corporate interests.

It's a TRAP!

[ArhcAngel]

Do not trust anything the media companies do no matter how benevolent they seem. Their end game is to control the stream of data to the customer and they will do everything in their power to destroy Net Neutrality. I would have forensic attorneys and coders going over these bits with a fine-tooth comb before using it.

Re:It's a TRAP!

[Anonymous Coward]

A customer wouldn't be using this, numbnuts.

Re: It's a TRAP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the back doors and vulnerabilities? Submarine patents?

Ain't that something

[Anonymous Coward]

Didnt read TFA or even the summary. Only read half the headline. Just stopped by to say: fuck that shit!

Symbolicly significant

[inode_buddha]

This is very significant in its symbolism actually -- remember, it was ATT/Bell Labs that invented C and UNIX and used it internally for their systems management. So for them to open this to the Linux Foundation could be seen as a strong endorsement.

Re:Symbolicly significant

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite how I remember it,,, people invented it and the lab kept it out of the hands of as many people as possible until minux and linux came along... innovation is not helped, but rather hampered by these huge labs / companies... raspberry pi / aurdino are leading to true innovation

Re:Symbolicly significant

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. C and UNIX were created by people who happened to be employed by AT&T/Bell Labs; they faced a lot of opposition from the bean counters.

Saying that AT&T/Bell Labs created these things is as stupid as saying that the Gubmint invented the Internet just because a few dollars from their respective coffers made into someone's hands. Who cares that the seeds were planted by people who received some resources from some source; both C and UNIX are the results of nearly countless hours of decentralized work by many disparate peoples across the entire fucking planet.

The innate intuition of the social human to focus blame or accolades onto one Great Leader is rarely correct. Have some respect for the collective efforts of individuals who personally decided to put their time and energy into these things.

Re:Symbolicly significant

[Anonymous Coward]

> remember, it was ATT/Bell Labs that invented C and UNIX

No, it was Dennis Ritchie who invented C, and also Unix along with Ken Thompson. I would say they invented it *despite* ATT.
Big corporations never invent works of genius, individual employees do. All works of genius are creative acts by individuals. What corporations do at most is to try *kill* employee creativity by planning incremental results every quarter.

Re:Symbolicly significant

[evilviper]

The AT&T of today is just an empty brand name that SBC was able to purchase for a pittance, as the withered husk of the old AT&T was practically gone.

There's no significance in buying a Polaroid DVD player, either.

Re: Symbolicly significant

[Anonymous Coward]

that'd be wrong. it was BSD Unix that kind of shoved the barn door open on AT&T unix. Then AT&T licensed what they could for companies to release SysV-based Unixes (SunOS et al).

Re:Symbolicly significant

[frankenheinz]

*This* is not *that* AT&T. (Two different companies entirely.)

AT&T the WIRETAPPERS

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it worth a fuck?

I would like to build a community too

[Anonymous Coward]

where we can all watch AT&T and Comcast and the rest of them go fuck themselves

Any details whatsoever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Language? Data Path Platforms supported (DPDK, Freescale DPAA, Brocade, Maxim)?, Network support (VLANS, MPLS, RSVP, OSPF)?

The kernel -includes- SDN in 98% fewer lines

[raymorris]

Kernel programmer here (though I barely qualify for the title).

The stock kernel includes all the basics of software-defined networking - bridging, firewalls, etc. Obviously that's just a small percentage of the kernel, less than 1% of the kernel's 15 million lines. Which means the kernel does basic SDN in no more than about 150,000 lines. Why AT&T needed to add 50 times as much is a legitimate question. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, like many software projects, they used ten times as much code as needed for the job, resulting in ten times as many bugs.

Re:The kernel -includes- SDN in 98% fewer lines

[HiThere]

That's possible, but my guess would be that they implemented a large number of features that the kernel didn't even contemplate (and would insist on relegating to user space). Feature creep is a constant problem.

Another thing is, AT&T probably didn't HAVE user space separate from the kernel, as the entire application was intended as a software defined network.

Re: The kernel -includes- SDN in 98% fewer lines

[Anonymous Coward]

all sorts of accounting overhead is going to be in the code too.

Did they write in Erlang?

Re: The kernel -includes- SDN in 98% fewer lines

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much latency in the stock kernel, that is why we have Netmap, DPDK, PF-Ring, etc.

Re:The kernel -includes- SDN in 98% fewer lines

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't know what an SDN is. It is a software stack that allows you to control optical controllers (boxes that control network at the hardware level: laser channels, optical routing, ...) and IP controllers (boxes that control IP routers, e.g from Cisco and Juniper, but also Linux boxes). Take a look at OpenDayLight (https://www.opendaylight.org), ONOS (http://onosproject.org) or Ryu (http://osrg.github.io/ryu/).

Yes, and so what you use becomes the standard

[raymorris]

> Is it to get people to write code for them for free?

Yes. AT&T and BT both need much of the same code. It's inefficient for them to both write separate, incompatible implementations. Better for AT&T to share the initial code base, then when BT makes improvements or adds things, AT&T can use BT's work too.

Also, it's entirely possible that if AT&T kept their code proprietary, the industry as a whole would largely standardize on some OTHER code base. Then AT&T would be stuck with a huge mass of outdated, incompatible code. By open sourcing a reasonably good system, it encourages others in the industry to use it, so that the industry tends to standardize on what AT&T is already invested in.

Seems like communism

[dhaen]

All these people working for the common good ;-)

Where's the beef?

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T managed to announce that they released s/w without providing a url to the s/w.
    http://about.att.com/story/network_playbook_into_open_source.html

Kind of sad like the scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life' where it's customary to bring money to make a bank deposit.

Any clue if there is actually a url for the release?

Why ATT really wants this

[knorthern knight]

Today's situation... ATT has to pay through the nose to Cisco/Juniper etal for network switches, and beg and plead for the specs ATT wants.

ATT's goal... ATT gets to slap the code with the specs they want, into a glorified Raspberry Pi or Nvidia GPU, maybe as firmware. And Cisco/Juniper/etal stocks are going to collapse. ATT is not in the network switch/router business. But it is a major capital cost for them. If they can roll-their-own, or get Foxconn to build to their specs, ATT stands to save a bundle of money. Imagine you're a taxi company. You're not in the car manufacturing business. But if you could get Foxconn to custom-build taxis for you at a fraction of the cost of what Ford or GM charges, you'd jump on the deal right away.

Has an email client and lisp interpreter too...

[mattr]

Considering the code size it undoubtedly has many auxiliary features including the ability to read email. Considering the provenance it probably can read everyone else's email too.