The Linux Foundation

Background

The Linux Foundation has long served as the home for many of the world’s most important open source software projects. We act as the vendor-neutral steward of the collaborative processes that developers engage in to create high quality and trustworthy code. We also work to build the developer and commercial communities around that code to sponsor each project’s members. We’ve learned that finding ways for all sorts of companies to benefit from using and contributing back to open source software development is key to the project’s sustainability. 

Over the last few years, we have also added a series of projects focused on lightweight open standards efforts — recognizing the critical complementary role that standards play in building the open technology landscape. Linux would not have been relevant if not for POSIX, nor would the Apache HTTPD server have mattered were it not for the HTTP specification. And just as with our open source software projects, commercial participants’ involvement has been critical to driving adoption and sustainability.

On the horizon, we envision another category of collaboration, one which does not have a well-established term to define it, but which we are today calling “Open Governance Networks.” Before describing it, let’s talk about an example.

Consider ICANN, the agency that arose after demands emerged from evolving the global domain name system (DNS) from its single-vendor control by Network Solutions. With ICANN, DNS became something more vendor-neutral, international, and accountable to the Internet community. It evolved to develop and manage the “root” of the domain name system, independent from any company or nation. ICANN’s control over the DNS comes primarily through its establishment of an operating agreement among domain name registrars that establishes rules for registrations, guarantees your domain names are portable, and a uniform dispute resolution protocol (the UDRP) for times when a domain name conflicts with an established trademark or causes other issues. 

ICANN is not a standards body; they happily use the standards for DNS developed at the IETF. They also do not create software other than software incidental to their mission, perhaps they also fund some DNS software development, but that’s not their core. ICANN is not where all DNS requests go to get resolved to IP addresses, nor even where everyone goes to register their domain name — that is all pushed to registrars and distributed name servers. In this way, ICANN is not fully decentralized but practices something you might call “minimum viable centralization.” Its management of the DNS has not been without critics, but by pushing as much of the hard work to the edge and focusing on being a neutral core, they’ve helped the DNS and the Internet achieve a degree of consistency, operational success, and trust that would have been hard to imagine building any other way. 

There are similar organizations that interface with open standards and software but perform governance functions. A prime example of this is the CA Browser Forum, who manages the root certificates for the SSL/TLS web security infrastructure.

Do we need such organizations? Can’t we go completely decentralized? While some cryptocurrency networks claim not to need formal human governance, it’s clear that there are governance roles performed by individuals and organizations within those communities. Quite a bit of governance is possible to automate via smart contracts (and repairing damage from exploiting them), promoting the platform’s adoption to new users, onboarding new organizations, or even coordinating hard fork upgrades still require humans in the mix. And this is especially important in environments where competitors need to participate in the network to succeed, but do not trust one competitor to make the decisions.

Network governance is not a solved problem

Network governance is not just an issue for the technical layers. As one moves up the stack into more domain-specific applications, it turns out that there are network governance challenges up here as well, which look very familiar.

Consider a typical distributed application pattern: supply chain traceability, where participants in the network can view, on a distributed database or ledger, the history of the movement of an object from source to destination, and update the network when they receive or send an object. You might be a raw materials supplier, or a manufacturer, or distributor, or retailer. In any case, you have a vested interest in not only being able to trust this distributed ledger to be an accurate and faithful representation of the truth. You also want the version you see to be the same ledger everyone else sees, be able to write to it fairly, and understand what happens if things go wrong. Achieving all of these desired characteristics requires network governance!

You may be thinking that none of this is strictly needed if only everyone agreed to use one organization’s centralized database to serve as the system of record. Perhaps that is a company like eBay, or Amazon, Airbnb, or Uber. Or perhaps, a non-profit charity or government agency can run this database for us. There are some great examples of shared databases managed by non-profits, such as Wikipedia, run by the Wikimedia Foundation. This scenario might work for a distributed crowdsourced encyclopedia, but would it work for a supply chain? 

This participation model requires everyone engaging in the application ecosystem to trust that singular institution to perform a very critical role — and not be hacked, or corrupted, or otherwise use that position of power to unfair ends. There is also a trust the entity will not become insolvent or otherwise unable to meet the community’s needs. How many Wikipedia entries have been hijacked or subject to “edit wars” that go on forever? Could a company trust such an approach for its supply chain? Probably not.

Over the last ten years, we’ve seen the development of new tools that allow us to build better-distributed data networks without that critical need for a centralized database or institution holding all the keys and trust. Most of these new tools use distributed ledger technology (“DLT”, or “blockchain”) to build a single source of truth across a network of cooperating peers, and embed programmatic functionality as “smart contracts” or “chaincode” across the network. 

The Linux Foundation has been very active in DLT, first with the launch of Hyperledger in December of 2015. The launch of the Trust Over IP Foundation earlier this year focused on the application of self-sovereign identity, and in many examples, usually using a DLT as the underlying utility network. 

As these efforts have focused on software, they left the development, deployment, and management of these DLT networks to others. Hundreds of such networks built on top of Hyperledger’s family of different protocol frameworks have launched, some of which (like the Food Trust Network) have grown to hundreds of participating organizations. Many of these networks were never intended to extend beyond an initial set of stakeholders, and they are seeing very successful outcomes. 

However, many of these networks need a critical mass of industry participants and have faced difficulty achieving their goal. A frequently cited reason is the lack of clear or vendor-neutral governance of the network. No business wants to place its data, or the data it depends upon, in the hands of a competitor; and many are wary even of non-competitors if it locks down competition or creates a dependency on a market participant. For example, what if the company doesn’t do well and decides to exit this business segment? And at the same time, for most applications, you need a large percentage of any given market to make it worthwhile, so addressing these kinds of business, risk, or political objections to the network structure is just as important as ensuring the software works as advertised.

In many ways, this resembles the evolution of successful open source projects, where developers working at a particular company realize that just posting their source code to a public repository isn’t sufficient. Nor even is putting their development processes online and saying “patches welcome.” 

To take an open source project to the point where it becomes the reference solution for the problem being solved and can be trusted for mission-critical purposes, you need to show how its governance and sustainability are not dependent upon a single vendor, corporate largess, or charity. That usually means a project looks for a neutral home at a place like the Linux Foundation, to provide not just that neutrality, but also competent stewarding of the community and commercial ecosystem.

Announcing LF Open Governance Networks

To address this need, today, we are announcing that the Linux Foundation is adding “Open Governance Networks” to the types of projects we host. We have several such projects in development that will be announced before the end of the year. These projects will operate very similarly to the Linux Foundation’s open source software projects, but with some additional key functions. Their core activities will include:

• Hosting a technical steering committee to specify the software and standards used to build the network, to monitor the network’s health, and to coordinate upgrades, configurations, and critical bug fixes
• Hosting a policy and legal committee to specify a network operating agreement the organizations must agree to for connecting their nodes to the network
• Running a system for identity on the network, so participants to trust other participants who they say they are, monitor the network for health, and take corrective action if required.
• Building out a set of vendors who can be hired to deploy peers-as-a-service on behalf of members, in addition to allowing members’ technical staff to run their own if preferred.
• Convene a Governing Board composed of sponsoring members who oversee the budget and priorities.
• Advocate for the network’s adoption by the relevant industry, including engaging relevant regulators and secondary users who don’t run their own peers.
• Potentially manage an open “app store” approach to offering vetted re-usable deployable smart contracts of add-on apps for network users.

These projects will be sustained through membership dues set by the Governing Board on each project, which will be kept to what’s needed for self-sufficiency. Some may also choose to establish transaction fees to compensate operators of peers if usage patterns suggest that would be beneficial. Projects will have complete autonomy regarding technical and software choices – there are no requirements to use other Linux Foundation technologies. 

To ensure that these efforts live up to the word “open” and the Linux Foundation’s pedigree, the vast majority of technical activity on these projects, and development of all required code and configurations to run the software that is core to the network will be done publicly. The source code and documentation will be published under suitable open source licenses, allowing for public engagement in the development process, leading to better long-term trust among participants, code quality, and successful outcomes. Hopefully, this will also result in less “bike-shedding” and thrash, better visibility into progress and activity, and an exit strategy should the cooperation efforts hit a snag. 

Depending on the industry that it services, the ledger itself might or might not be public. It may contain information only authorized for sharing between the parties involved on the network or account for GDPR or other regulatory compliance. However, we will certainly encourage long term approaches that do not treat the ledger data as sensitive. Also, an organization must be a member of the network to run peers on the network, required to see the ledger, and particularly write to it or participate in consensus.

Across these Open Governance Network projects, there will be a shared operational, project management, marketing, and other logistical support provided by Linux Foundation personnel who will be well-versed in the platform issues and the unique legal and operational issues that arise, no matter which specific technology is chosen.

These networks will create substantial commercial opportunity:

• For software companies building DLT-based applications, this will help you focus on the truly value-delivering apps on top of such a shared network, rather than the mechanics of forming these networks.
• For systems integrators, DLT integration with back-office databases and ERP is expected to grow to be billions of dollars in annual activity.
• For end-user organizations, the benefits of automating thankless, non-differentiating, perhaps even regulatorily-required functions could result in huge cost savings and resource optimization.

For those organizations acting as governing bodies on such networks today, we can help you evolve those projects to reach an even wider audience while taking off your hands the low margin, often politically challenging, grunt work of managing such networks.

And for those developers concerned before about whether such “private” permissioned networks would lead to dead cul-de-sacs of software and wasted effort or lost opportunity, having the Linux Foundation’s bedrock of open source principles and collaboration techniques behind the development of these networks should help ensure success.

We also recognize that not all networks should be under this model. We expect a diversity of approaches that will be long term sustainable, and encourage these networks to find a model that works for them. Let’s talk to see if it would be appropriate.

LF Governance Networks will enable our communities to establish their own Open Governance Network and have an entity to process agreements and collect transaction fees. This new entity is a Delaware nonprofit, a nonstock corporation that will maximize utility and not profit. Through agreements with the Linux Foundation, LF Governance Networks will be available to Open Governance Networks hosted at the Linux Foundation. 

If you’re interested in learning more about hosting an Open Governance Network at the Linux Foundation, please contact us at governancenetworks@linuxfoundation.org

Thanks!

Brian

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Global industry leaders and experts across financial services, technology and open source will come together virtually for thought-provoking insights and conversations about how to best leverage open source software to solve industry challenges.

SAN FRANCISCO, October 13, 2020 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-host Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit whose mission is to accelerate adoption of open source software, standards and best practices in financial services, today announced initial keynote speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum (OSSF). The event takes place virtually November 12 – 13 in the Eastern Standard Time (EST), UTC−05:00. The schedule can be viewed here and the keynote speakers can be viewed here. 

OSSF is the ONLY conference dedicated to driving collaboration and innovation in financial services through open source, and provides unparalleled opportunities to hear from and engage with the executives and individuals driving open source in financial services. The event will gather experts from financial services, technology and open source who will come together to deepen collaboration and drive innovation across the industry in order to deliver better code, faster.

“Open source is continuously showing its power to financial institutions as a key technology element and growth strategy driver,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation. “After welcoming FINOS to The Linux Foundation in April, we are thrilled to co-host Open Source Strategy Forum and work together to support and collaborate with the open source communities supporting financial services, as we continue to bring open source closer and closer to the end users.”

Keynote speakers this year include:

• Alejandra Villagra, Managing Director, Citi
• Kim Prado, Global Head of Client, Banking & Digital Technology, RBC
• Tosha Ellison, Chief Operating Officer, Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS)
• Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director, Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS)
• John Jeremiah, Product Marketing Manager, GitLab
• Pierre de Belen, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
• Sarah Novotny, Open Source Wonk, Azure Office of the CTO, Microsoft
• Alessandro Petroni, Global Director & Head, Strategy Financial Services, Red Hat
• Jo Ann Barefoot, Founder and CEO of AIR, the Alliance for Innovative Regulation
• Pia Mancini, Co-founder & CEO at Open Collective

“Now in its fourth year, and especially as the world adapts to a new normal, we’re excited to bring together an even broader and more diverse representation from financial services and the tech industries in what has consistently been called out as one of the most compelling and energetic events in our industry,” said Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director, FINOS. 

The 2-day event will feature 50+ sessions dedicated to showcasing recent developments and the direction of open source in financial services, with a focus on topics at the cross section of finance, open source and technology, including: 

• Leveraging open source to drive innovation and deliver business value in highly regulated industries.
• Introductions and technical talks on open source projects driven by and relevant to financial services.
• Cloud, blockchain, AI, desktop interop, synthetic data, regulation and many more open source tech topics changing the financial services landscape.
• Tools, policies and processes for successfully engaging with open source from legal and compliance concerns to growing and sustaining your open source projects.

Registration for the virtual event is open and is just US$75. Members of The Linux Foundation receive a 20 percent discount – members can contact events@linuxfoundation.org to request a member discount code. Members of FINOS can attend at no cost – members can contact ossf@finos.org to request the FINOS Member registration code. The Linux Foundation provides diversity and need-based registration scholarships for this event to anyone that needs it; for information on eligibility and to apply, click here. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for all the latest event updates and announcements.

Open Source Strategy Forum is made possible thanks to our sponsors, including Leader Sponsors GitLab and Red Hat. For information on becoming an event sponsor, click here.

Members of the press who would like to request a media pass should contact Kristin O’Connell at koconnell@linuxfoundation.org. 

Additional Resources

• Why Attend Open Source Summit
• Why Attend Linux Foundation Events

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation Events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

####

Media Contact:
Kristin O’Connell
The Linux Foundation
koconnell@linuxfoundation.org

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This week has been “a week of millions” for the Linux Foundation, with our announcement that over 1 million people have taken our free Introduction to Linux course. As part of the research for our recently published 2020 Linux Kernel History Report, the Kernel Project itself determined that it had surpassed one million code commits. Here is how we established the identity of this lucky Kernel Project contributor. 

Methodology:

The historical repo of BitKeeper (converted to Git) has 63,428 commits. We then found the merge at which Linus Torvalds’ repo has at least 936,572 commits (his repo has at least this many commits).

At commit 92c59e126b21fd212195358a0d296e787e444087 the repo had 936,456 commits (116 shy of the million)

 

>git checkout 92c59e126b21fd212195358a0d296e787e444087 >git log --oneline | wc  936456 7483489 62991540

 

The next merge 2f3fbfdaf77f3ac417d0511fac221f76af79f6fc passed that number, with 937,105

 

> git checkout 2f3fbfdaf77f3ac417d0511fac221f76af79f6fc > git log --oneline | wc  937105 7489456 63037625

 

So on merge 2f3fbfdaf77f3ac417d0511fac221f76af79f6fc Linus’ repo passed the 1M mark (to be precise, 1,000,533 including BitKeeper commits):

 

commit 2f3fbfdaf77f3ac417d0511fac221f76af79f6fc 92c59e126b21fd212195358a0d296e787e444087 f510ca05271b6f71bd532fe743b39f628110223f (HEAD) Merge: 92c59e126b21 f510ca05271b Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Date:   Mon Aug 3 19:19:34 2020 -0700 Merge tag 'arm-dt-5.9' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/soc/soc

 

At this point, we can simply list the 936,572nd commit in the log:

 

>git log --oneline | tail -936572 | head -1 85b23fbc7d88 x86/cpufeatures: Add enumeration for SERIALIZE instruction

 

And the committer is…

 

git log -1 85b23fbc7d88 commit 85b23fbc7d88f8c6e3951721802d7845bc39663d Author: Ricardo Neri <ricardo.neri-calderon@linux.intel.com> Date:   Sun Jul 26 21:31:29 2020 -0700     x86/cpufeatures: Add enumeration for SERIALIZE instruction

 

Ricardo’s momentous commit to the Kernel was to add enumeration support for the SERIALIZE instruction, supported in Intel’s forthcoming Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake microarchitectures for their 10-nanometer server and workstation chips. Ricardo is a software engineer who has been working on Linux feature support for Intel’s microprocessors for 12 years as part of the company’s CPU enabling team.

For more about Intel Corporation’s Ricardo Neri, the one-millionth Linux Kernel code committer, please read and watch our interview, conducted by Swapnil Bhartiya on Linux.com.

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• Demonstrates collaborative commitment to open source networking across telecom, 5G, cloud native, network automation – enabled by critical projects like ONAP, Anthos, Kubernetes
• Move signals growing importance of open networking community in Cloud, Telecom and Enterprise markets 
• Amol Phadke joins the LFN Governing Board that comprises global executives operators, vendors, system integrators across ecosystem

  

SAN FRANCISCO– September 28, 2020 – LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open source networking projects, announces Google Cloud has joined as a Platinum member. Since its beginnings, Google’s mission has been to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, and Google Cloud’s vision is to be the most trusted, simple, innovative cloud for customers around the world. Through its membership, Google will further the acceleration of open source technologies across cloud native networking, telecoms, network automation, 5G, and more. 

“We look forward to working with all members and the larger community to continue to find ways to bring further value to consumers and communications services providers alike, demonstrating how public cloud can help fundamentally transform networking in new and exciting ways“, said Amol Phadke, Managing Director: Global Telecom Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. “Google’s excellence in creating and sponsoring components like Kuberntes, Istio and Knative—and successfully integrating them into products like Anthos—will be a key pillar within the Linux Foundation Networking.”

“We look forward to Google’s collaboration in powering the future of open networking,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IOT, the Linux Foundation. “As technology evolves, cross-vertical integration is increasingly important. Google’s expertise and leadership is a welcome addition to the LFN community.”

Google’s Amol Phadke, managing director, Global Telecom Industry Solutions, joins the LFN Board of Directors.  

Google Cloud joins additional LFN Platinum members: Amdocs, AT&T, Bell, China Mobile, China Telecom, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Nokia, Orange, RedHat, Samsung, Tech Mahindra, Turk Telekom, Verizon, VMWare, Vodafone, and ZTE. To learn more about LFN, its projects, and the global community it represents, visit here.

This week, LFN co-hosts the Open Networking & Edge Summit (ONES), the industry’s premier open networking event now expanded to comprehensively cover Edge Computing, Edge Cloud & IoT. ONES enables collaborative development and innovation across enterprises, service providers/telcos and cloud providers to shape the future of networking and edge computing. To register and join the virtual event through September 30, visit: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-networking-edge-summit-north-america/register/ 

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. 

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

 # # #

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“When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents.”  — Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

Overview

What do some of the world’s largest, most regulated, complex, centuries-old industries such as banking, telecommunications, and energy have in common with rapid development, bleeding-edge innovative, creative industries such as the motion pictures industry?

They’re all dependent on open source software. 

That would be a great answer and correct, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. A complete answer is these industries not only depend on open source, but they’re building open source into the fabric of their R&D and development models. They are all dependent on the speed of innovation that collaborating in open source enables. 

As a recent McKinsey & Co. report described, the “biggest differentiator” for top-quartile companies in an industry vertical was “open source adoption,” where they shifted from users to contributors. The report’s data shows that top-quartile company adoption of open source has three times the impact on innovation than companies in other quartiles.

Over the last 20 years, the Linux Foundation has expanded from a single project, the Linux kernel, to hundreds of distinct project communities. The “foundation-as-a-service” model developed by Linux Foundation supports communities collaborating on open source across key horizontal technology domains, such as cloud, security, blockchain, and the web. 

However, many of these project communities align across vertical industry groupings, such as automotive, motion pictures, finance, telecommunications, energy, and public health initiatives. They may have started as individual efforts looking for a neutral home at the Linux Foundation. Still, over time these communities found it useful to collaborate as the organizations supporting the projects expanded their collaboration to other areas.

This paper will delve into the major vertical industry initiatives served by the Linux Foundation. We will highlight the most notable open source projects and why we believe these key industry verticals, some over 100 years old, have transformed themselves using open source software.

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• Deep Dive demonstrations on 5G, Edge, IOT, O-RAN, AI, Cloud Native & CNFs covering most important enterprise, cloud and telecom use cases 
• Expert live sessions on “Why Open Source for Edge?” answered – Over 75% say collaborative market creation and adoption acceleration are top factors for participating in open source
• Total value of software created by shared innovation model totals $7.3B (2000+ Devs over 6+ years), according to new COCOMO research, “Estimated Development Value of LFN Software”
• 5 tracks, 13  keynote presentations, 80+ sessions with thousands of peers attending to collaborate on business value of open networking & edge 

SAN FRANCISCO –  September 23, 2020 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today marked significant progress in the open networking and edge spaces. In advance of the Open Networking and Edge Summit happening September 28-30, Linux Foundation umbrella projects LF Edge and LF Networking demonstrate recent achievements highlighting trends that set the stage for next-generation technology. 

“We are thrilled to announce a number of milestones across our networking and edge projects, which will be on virtual display at ONES next week,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IOT, at the Linux Foundation. “Indicative of what’s coming next, our communities are laying the groundwork for markets like cloud native, 5G, and edge to explode in terms of open deployments.” 

Recent Acceleration within Networking & Edge includes:

• LFN is shepherding the culmination of Cloud Native and 5G (5G Cloud Native demo, OVP, which now includes Cloud Native requirements). 
• The industry is becoming accustomed to a new way of compliance and verification  out in the open (via OVP) – be it cloud native, 5G, Edge, or otherwise. 
• SDN + NFV: OPNFV celebrates its sixth birthday as CNTT prepares to issue its Baraque release; meanwhile, OpenDaylight issues Aluminum, its 13th release. 

“We are together in a tough period. Thanks to all developers and contributors of LFN and LF Edge to tirelessly propel various projects to be on the trac,” said Dr. Junlan Feng, chief scientist at China Mobile, general manager of AI and Intelligent Operation R&D Center, and LFN Board chair. “Cloud Native and 5G are also top priorities of China Mobile to strengthen the experience of our customers. For moving forward, we see there is a great opportunity to fuse together network automation and network intelligence through ONAP, Acumos, Edge, etc. EUAG under LFN is conducting a study to collect and analyze the common requirements of 5G and intelligent network in our industry. We as a community will continuously work together. Thanks to Linux Foundation for taking the lead.”

At the edge, unification has happened and projects (e.g., Akraino, EdgeX Foundry, and Fledge) have delivered deployable code. And the new LF Edge Vertical Solutions Group is working to enable easily-customized deployments based on market/vertical requirements. Opportunities exist for end users across verticals – e.g., enterprise, automotive, industrial – to participate in shaping the direction of how open source gets deployed at the edge. Join the launch event, “Launching the LF Edge End User Community” on October 1, co-located with ONES. 

“Open source collaboration from edge to network is critical to achieve compatibility and complementarity.  ONES is THE event for communities to come together – learning about the latest trends in projects and determining how to evolve technology across boundaries and borders, ” said Melissa Evers-Hood, governing board chair for LF Edge and vice president, Intel Architecture, Graphics and Software, Software Business Strategy.

Technology in action at Open Networking & Edge Summit

See innovation in action during the virtual ONES event, September 28-30 and immerse yourself in the latest open source innovations across networking and edge with community-driven demos in the LF Networking & LF Edge Pavilion. The demos will be open throughout the event but visit during booth hours to engage with the demo managers and ask questions. 

Key demonstrations include:

• OVP Automation DevOps: Agile Adoption in VNF/CNF based Network Service Industry: This demo will leverage ONAP SDC, ONAP VF-C, and OVP VTP projects to build DevOps for OPNFV Verification Program end-to-end VNF and Network service testing which helps to address agility, automation, and testing challenges.
• Self-Healing Using Streaming Analytics & Observability for Latency Sensitive Kubernetes Workloads: This demo showcases components necessary towards zero touch infrastructure automation using Kubernetes enhancements, streaming analytics, host telemetry, and a viable path to deployment.
• Real-Time Sensor Fusion for Loss Detection: This demo shows how different sensor devices can use LF Edge’s EdgeX Foundry open-middleware framework to optimize retail operations and detect loss at checkout. 
• Managing Industrial IoT Data Using LF Edge: LF Edge projects EVE and Fledge will show how they can securely manage, connect, aggregate, process, buffer and forward any sensor, machine or PLC’s data to existing OT systems and any cloud.

More details and a list of all demos is available here: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-networking-edge-summit-north-america/features/lfn-lfe-demos/ 

The event also features an impressive line up of expert keynote speakers, 80+ sessions and five separate tracks, including: Business Critical & Innovation; Carriers: Core/Edge/Access; Cloud Networking & Edge; Enterprise, Networking & Edge; and Sponsored Tutorials.

Don’t miss out on additional experiences, including “Ask the Expert Sessions” where attendees can engage directly with open networking and edge technical, business and community leaders daily in our Ask the Expert Sessions. “Mingle with Your Board and Technical Executives,” happening Tuesday at 4:00 pm ET, is facilitated by Will Townsend, Analyst Moor Insights & Strategy and will provide an open, informal discussion about the future of Networking, Edge, IOT, 5G, with top people at end users, operators, and vendors. No question is off the table – Ask Anything!

Due to the current COVID-19 outbreak, ONES is being offered virtually for only $50 US. Register today and join the community September 28-30: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-networking-edge-summit-north-america/register/ . 

Support from Project Technical Steering Committee Chairs

Akraino
“Launched in 2018, and founding project of LF Edge umbrella, Akraino delivers an open source software stack that supports a high-availability cloud stack optimized for edge computing systems and applications. With three successful releases, the community of over 40+ companies engaged worldwide, more than 20 fully integrated edge blueprints, blueprints tested in 15 user labs and a community lab, and a growing list of user deployments across the globe, Akraino truly become the enabler of edge computing use cases across Telco, IoT, Cloud, and Enterprise use cases,” said Kandan Kathirvel, TSC-Chair, AT&T, and Tina Tsou, Co-Chair, Arm. “This ONES event will be an opportunity to learn more about the edge use cases and Akraino solutions to it.”

EdgeX Foundry
“EdgeX Foundry is in its 4th year of development as a Linux Foundation project.With 6 successful releases, a community of over 180 committers worldwide, more than 7 million container downloads, and a growing list of commercial companies adopting and using EdgeX (like Accenture, HP, ThunderSoft, Tibco, IOTech Systems, and Jiangxing Intelligence), we believe EdgeX has established itself as one of, if not the, premier open source edge solution frameworks,”  said Jim White, TSC Chair, EdgeX Foundry and CTO of IOTech. “We are excited that ‘edge’ has been incorporated into the formerly Open Network Summit, and we are looking forward to our participation in the new “edge” tracks with our fellow LF Edge project members.”

Fledge
“Fledge is an open source framework and community for the industrial edge focused on applications for critical operations, condition-based monitoring, predictive maintenance, quality, situational awareness and safety.   Fledge integrates IIoT, sensors, machines, processes and other industrial assets with existing ISQ95 systems and the cloud” said Mark Riddoch, Fledge TSC Chair.  ” Fledge 1.8 is a mature, field-tested solution operating in power generation/transmission/distribution, water and wastewater processing, oil and gas, discrete manufacturing,  pharma and professional auto racing.  We invite manufacturers, equipment suppliers, system integrators, and partners to use Fledge and join our community as we grow THE open source application stack for industrial transformations.”

Open Horizon
“Being a young stage one project, Open Horizon is grateful for the opportunity to meet so many people active in the open source networking and edge computing areas.  Despite not being able to meet face-to-face, the Linux Foundation’s LFN and LF Edge have provided us with a great format that allows us to have personal, in-depth discussions with anyone who is interested from the comfort of home, and without needing to shout over the crowds to be heard.  We hope you’ll come visit us and enjoy our short demo,” said Joe Pearson, TSC chair, Open Horizon and Technology Strategist, and IBM Cloud. 

OPNFV
“This event will be an opportunity to learn about the pivotal changes, new emphasis, and growth in the OPNFV community. OPNFV’s conformance testing and infrastructure projects, led by the contributions of Orange and many other industry leaders, will soon benefit from even more Telco participation as the CNTT task force members merge with OPNFV. Also, we have paid-forward our successes by taking-on many Linux Foundation Networking Interns in OPNFV this year. Join us and hear our stories,”  said Al Morton, OPNFV TSC Chair.

ONAP
“Our ONAP Community is actively working on the certification of our 7th Major Release (Guilin) scheduled for the end of this year. This release continues to increase the support for 5G in areas of network slicing and O-RAN integration, ETSI (e.g. SOL007) and 3GPP standards, as well as our E2E CNF Orchestration chain,” said Catherine Lefevre, AVP-Network Cloud and SDN Platform Integration, AT&T, and chair of the ONAP Technical Steering Committee. “The ONES Summit is a great event where enterprises who have embraced ONAP can showcase their latest innovations. Also, do not miss our demo corners, which will illustrate areas such as: Onboarding 5G CNFs with ONAP, Policy-based RAN Management using O-RAN’s Open-Source Non-RealTime-RIC, ONAP Policy Framework Integration with Bell Canada’s Control Loop Use-cases, and much more. We also invite you to our special panel, ‘ONAP & Cloud Native – the Best of the Two Worlds’,  where we will present an overview of our ONAP Cloud Native journey.”

State of the Edge (SOTE)
“As edge computing goes mainstream it will bring forth a wave of technologies that require cooperation across the entire ecosystem to deliver value to end customers,” said Matt Trifiro, CMO of Vapor IO and co-chair of The Linux Foundation’s State of the Edge project. “The Open Networking and Edge Summit creates opportunities for technologists and end users to collaborate around open source for edge and networking that will revolutionize the cloud, robotics, artificial intelligence, healthcare, manufacturing, data centers, mobile devices, smart cities, and autonomous vehicles.”

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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SODA Foundation’s open data framework Greenland release simplifies data storage in heterogeneous environments; Japan Data Storage Forum and Seagate Technology become newest contributors

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 22, 2020 STORAGE DEVELOPER CONFERENCE — The SODA Foundation, which hosts the open source, unified and autonomous data management framework for data mobility from edge to core to cloud, today announced the Greenland release of its open data framework and that Japan Data Storage Forum (JDSF) and Seagate are joining the Foundation. The Greenland release simplifies data storage in heterogeneous environments, while the new members will further accelerate data mobility and autonomy across the industry. The Greenland release will be available at the end of September.

“The demand for and complexity of data mobility between cloud, on premise and the edge is resulting in rapid collaboration and development on the SODA Foundation’s open data framework,” said Steven Tan, chairman, SODA Foundation and VP & CTO of Cloud Solution at Futurewei. “The Greenland release represents this rapid collaboration and important advances in data storage. We are also welcoming some of the world’s most significant leaders in the data storage space. We’re looking forward to contributions from JDSF and Seagate Technology.”

JDSF is the first and leading storage-related organization in Japan and is a source for the latest information for manufacturers, systems integrators and users who require storage network system verification and data backup operations standards.

“The SODA Foundation represents a global collaboration on the future of data mobility in every environment,” said Takatsuna Chikaraishi, Chairman at JDSF. “It’s a natural move for us to join the Foundation and help advance an open data framework for everyone.”

Seagate Technology is a world leader in data storage and management solutions and helps to maximize humanity’s potential by innovating world-class, precision-engineered data management solutions with a focus on sustainable partnerships.

“We see the SODA Foundation’s open source approach to data movement and management API’s enabling hybrid cloud storage architecture management as key to datasphere growth,” said Ken Claffey, Vice President, Enterprise Data Solutions, Seagate Technology.”

Also announced today is the release of Greenland, the 2.0 version of SODA Foundation’s open data framework. It includes Storage Performance Monitoring (SPM), SODA CSI plug-and-play, multi-cloud file services, KubeEdge integration and file support for NetApp ONTAP, among others. Details include:

• SPM offers a unified view in heterogeneous storage environments and integrates with tools such as Prometheus and Kafka to provide deep visibility and insights into cloud native environments.
• SODA CSI plug-and-play enables multi-vendor CSI storage to be managed by the SODA Open Data Framework, simplifying storage management for Kubernetes.
• Multi-cloud file services offer support for Google Cloud Platform in addition to AWS and Azure
• KubeEdge integration experimental feature provides a first glimpse into edge data
• management with SODA.
• File Support for NetApp ONTAP and more South Bound Drivers enables more on-premise Data Center use cases.

Greenland builds on the previous Faroe release, which included support for block, file, and object storage, multi cloud data control, telemetry, resource management across heterogeneous storage, Container Storage Interface (CSI) storage plug-and-play as an experimental feature that simplifies Kubernetes storage management by abstracting CSI storage with SODA.

As data moves between the cloud, on premise and, increasingly, the Edge, data management is becoming more complex. And the increasing number of technologies supporting data management has created even more difficulty, including unintentional silos for data storage. During a time when data mobility and autonomy is more important than ever, it’s critical to simplify management, unify storage pools and provide a vendor neutral forum and platform that can accelerate innovation for end users. SODA Foundation seeks to reduce silos by integrating efforts across platforms for overall data mobility and autonomy.

Additional Member Comments
NTT Communications
“The SODA v2.0 Greenland release has extremely useful features for unified data management across multi cloud and on premise and new file support for NetApp ONTAP. We are happy to be integrating VMWare support for heterogeneous storages for our on-premise data center use cases. SODA engineering team and community welcomes priorities from end users like us,” said Kei Kusunoki, Storage Manager, Innovation Center, NTT Communications.

Yahoo! JAPAN
“We are happy to see the Greenland release with its features for heterogeneous storage . The SODA community is actively providing very good support for this integration and always open for improvements and new features,” said Yusuke Sato, Storage Architect, Yahoo! JAPAN.

About the SODA Foundation
Previously OpenSDS, the SODA Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation and includes both open source software and standards to support the increasing need for data autonomy. SODA Foundation Premiere members include China Unicom, Fujitsu, Huawei, NTT Communications and Toyota Motor Corporation. Other members include China Construction Bank Fintech, Click2Cloud, GMO Pepabo, IIJ, MayaData, LinBit, Scality, Sony, Wipro and Yahoo Japan.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
jennifer@storychangesculture.com
503-867-2304

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Click on the image above to read the September 2020 Linux Foundation Newsletter

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The Linux Foundation would like to reiterate its statements and analysis of the application of US Export Control regulations to public, open collaboration projects (for example, open source software, open standards, open hardware, and open data) and the importance of open collaboration in the successful, global development of the world’s most important technologies.

Today’s announcement of prohibited transactions by the Department of Commerce regarding WeChat and TikTok in the United States confirms our initial impact analysis for open source collaboration. Nothing in the orders prevents or impacts our communities’ ability to openly collaborate with two valued members of our open source ecosystem, Tencent and ByteDance. From around the world, our members and participants engage in open collaboration because it is open and transparent, and those participants are clear that they desire to continue collaborating with their peers around the world.

As a reminder, we would like to point anyone with questions to our prior blog post on US export regulations, which links to our more detailed analysis of the topic. Both are available in English and Simplified Chinese for the convenience of our audiences.

The post Open Source Collaboration is a Global Endeavor, Part 2 appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

Overview

There are many business reasons to use open source software. Many of today’s most significant business breakthroughs, including big data, machine learning, cloud computing, Internet of Things, and streaming analytics, sprang from open source software innovations. Open source software often comes into an organization as the backbone of many essential devices, programs, platforms, and tools such as robotics, sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT), automotive telematics, and autonomous driving, edge computing, and big data computing. Open source software code is working on many smartphones, laptops, servers, databases, and cloud infrastructures and services. Developers build most applications by leveraging frameworks like Node. js or pulling in libraries that have been tested and proven in many production use cases. To use almost any of these things is to use open source software in one form or another, and often in combination.

By using open source software, companies also avoid building everything from the ground up, saving time, money, and effort while also rendering more innovation from the investment. Open source software is generally more secure than using the commercial proprietary counterparts too. That is due in large part to the collaborative nature of open source software projects. As Linux creator Linus Torvalds once explained, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” That holds so long as there are “enough eyeballs,” which, given open source software’s adoption rate, may be challenging to have across all projects. Drawbacks do exist, as no software is perfect, not even open source software. However, for most organizations, the good far outweighs the bad. The codebase’s open nature also means it’s easier to report and fix software versus alternative models.

While open source software offers many reliable and provable business advantages, sometimes those advantages remain obscure to those who have not looked deeply into the topic, including many high-level decision-makers. This paper, published by the European Chapter of the TODO Group, aims to provide a balanced and quick overview of the business pros and cons of using open source software.

To download Why Open Source Matters to Your Enterprise click on the button below Download Whitepaper

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The leading vendor neutral open source event will virtually showcase existing and emerging technologies as well as bring together global open source leaders and community visionaries.

SAN FRANCISCO, September 3, 2020 –The Linux Foundation announced today the full line-up of sessions for the Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020 Virtual Experience, the leading conference for open source developers, technologists, and community leaders. The event takes place virtually October 26 – 29 in the Greenwich Mean Time Zone. The schedule can be viewed here and the keynote speakers can be viewed here.

The 4-day event is dedicated to everything open source and will showcase a program of 250+ talks (conference session, tutorials, BoFs and keynotes) across tracks covering Linux Systems, IoT, AI, Cloud & Cloud Native, OS Dependability, OS Databases, Diversity & Inclusion, OS Leadership, Open Source Program Office Management (TODO) and the  Embedded Linux Conference.

“Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe has proven to be an important event for the European open source community to gather annually for learning and collaboration that helps to grow and sustain the ecosystem,” said Angela Brown, SVP & General Manager of Events at The Linux Foundation. “While the event is being held virtually in 2020, it  will continue to deliver innovative content from open source leaders across the globe on key open source topics and technologies, and will include numerous ways for attendees to further pursue  the engagement and collaboration opportunities the event has become synonymous with.”

Featured Conference Sessions Include:

• State of Linux Gaming – Gabriel Krisman Bertazi, Collabora
• From Remote First Towards Async First – Isabel Drost-Fromm, Europace AG
• Using the TPM – It’s Not Rocket Science (Anymore) – Johannes Holland & Peter Huewe, Infineon Technologies AG
• Building Trustworthy AI: Lessons from Open Source – Abigail Cabunoc Mayes, Mozilla
• Fast Execution for Function Compositions in Serverless Computing – Ruichuan Chen & Istemi Ekin Akkus, Nokia Bell Labs
• MySQL Performance for DevOps – Sveta Smirnova, Percona

Confirmed Keynote Speakers Include:

• Liz Rice, Vice President, Open Source Engineering, Aqua Security
• Andrew Wafaa, Director, Open Source Communities, Arm & Chair, The Yocto Project
• Jesús Labarta Mancho, Director, Computer Sciences Department, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
• Nithya Ruff, Executive Director, Open Source Program Office, Comcast & Chair, Board of Directors, The Linux Foundation
• Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer, DataStax
• Ali Fenn, President, ITRenew
• Shuli Goodman, Executive Director, LF Energy
• Thomas Gleixner, Chief Technology Officer, Linutronix GmbH
• Sachiko Muto, Chief Executive Officer, OpenForum Europe
• Angela Benton, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Streamlytics
• Neil McGovern, Executive Director, The GNOME Foundation
• Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation
• Allan Friedman, Director, Cybersecurity Initiatives, National Telecommunications & Information Administration, US Department of Commerce

Registration for the virtual event is open and is just US$50. Members of The Linux Foundation receive a 20 percent discount – members can contact events@linuxfoundation.org to request a member discount code. The Linux Foundation provides diversity and need-based registration scholarships for this event to anyone that needs it; for information on eligibility and to apply, click here. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for all the latest event updates and announcements.

Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020 is made possible thanks to our sponsors, including Platinum Sponsors Cloud Native Computing Foundation and IBM, Gold Sponsors Red Hat and VMware. For information on becoming an event sponsor, click here.

Members of the press who would like to request a media pass should contact Kristin O’Connell at koconnell@linuxfoundation.org.

Additional Resources

• Why Attend Open Source Summit
• Why Attend Linux Foundation Events

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation Events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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Media Contact:
Kristin O’Connell
The Linux Foundation
koconnell@linuxfoundation.org

The post The Linux Foundation Announces the Full Line-up of Sessions for the Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020 Virtual Experience, October 26 – 29 Open for all – Anytime. Anywhere. appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

Open data and analytics initiative aims to enable better risk management and boost financing for climate solutions

San Francisco, Calif., September 1, 2020 —The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the intent to form the LF Climate Finance Foundation (LFCF), a new initiative with the goal of empowering investors, banks, insurers, companies, governments, NGOs and academia with AI-enhanced open source analytics and open data to address climate risk and opportunity. Allianz, Amazon, Microsoft and S&P Global have already committed to be founding members. The Climate Finance Foundation’s planning team includes representatives from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Ceres and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).

The signing of the Paris Climate Accord in 2015 brings both unprecedented opportunity and challenges to the global investment community. Avoiding catastrophic levels of global warming and ensuring resilience will require at least $1.2 trillion more financing of climate solutions each year. Achieving this dramatic increase in investment requires better data and analytic tools to fully account for climate-related risk and opportunity. To help with this effort, the LFCF is building the OS-Climate platform, with the goal of enabling asset owners, asset managers and banks to manage climate risk and identify the climate-aligned companies, infrastructure, capital projects and technologies that will thrive in a low-carbon economy.

The LF Climate Finance Foundation is hosting the OS-Climate platform, which is expected to consist of multiple physical and economic scenarios, a global and open Data Commons and economic and financial models that accelerate predictive analytic tools and investment products that manage climate-related risk and finance climate solutions across every geography, sector and asset class.

“There is a clear call from major pension funds, banks, governments and civil society for public access to corporate climate data and other data needed for finance to support Paris Climate Accord goals, as well as for better tools to inform financial decisions,” said Truman Semans, who has led community building to support the OS-Climate platform and to form the LF Climate Finance Foundation.

Development on technology to be incorporated into the OS-Climate platform is already underway. For example, the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) just released a beta version of its open source Finance Tool, which is being developed by OS-Climate and Ortec Finance. The LFCF community anticipates integrating the Finance Tool into the OS-Climate platform and undertaking community-based development to further build out this tool. SBTi is a joint initiative of WWF, the World Resources Institute (WRI), the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and CDP.

“The cost and complexity of analytics for climate-related investments require highly organized collaboration and resource sharing across hundreds of users and contributors,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “The LF Climate Finance Foundation will enable neutral governance, shared development costs and technical leadership from many of the world’s leading financial institutions, multilateral organizations, academia, governments and NGOs.

“The collaboration among the LF Climate Finance Foundation’s stakeholders will deliver on these data and analytics needs with more speed and innovation than any one company could achieve on its own,” said Michael Tiemann, OS-Climate Senior Technical Advisor and former President of OSI, the leading international body for open source licensing and standards..

“Since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the world has been striving to bring together the innovation and capital of the private sector with the information and influence of governments and international institutions,” said Monique Barbut, former CEO of the global environment facility and former UN undersecretary. “The LF Climate Finance Foundation can make the OS-Climate Platform a vital tool to realize this goal, and boost investment not only for addressing climate change but also for protecting biodiversity.”

Investors and banks could use the platform to analyze portfolios and individual financings and investments. Governments are expected to use it to invest in resilient infrastructure, develop effective policy and enable regulators to manage market-related climate risk. Researchers could rely on the LF Climate Finance Foundation and its open data to surface even greater insights for advancing scalable climate opportunities. Investors and NGOs could to use the platform to advocate more effectively for corporations to align with Paris Accord goals.

“Leading asset owners and asset managers around the world understand climate change not only as an environmental challenge but also as an economic and risk management issue that is central to prudent investment,” said Lionel Johnson, president of the Pacific Pension & Investment Institute. “LF Climate Finance’s OS-Climate platform can help provide the data and analytics that are essential to fulfilling fiduciary responsibilities.”

For more information about this effort, please email membership@lfclimatefinance.org

Supporting Comments

Allianz
“Allianz is committed to steering our investment portfolios to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. High quality and reliable information about all the companies in which we are invested is the raw material for all decisions. Open source analytics and open climate data is a very promising way to support the financial industry in working with the investee companies to transition to carbon neutrality,” says Claus Stickler, Managing Director and Co-lead Allianz Investment Management SE.

Amazon
“To fight climate change, Amazon last year co-founded and signed The Climate Pledge – a commitment to be net zero carbon 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. We believe that more climate risk data and information will support signatories of this pledge and others in achieving the goal of becoming carbon neutral, and, at the same time, climate resilient,” said Kara Hurst, Vice President, Worldwide Sustainability, Amazon. “We are proud to be a technical lead working with the LF Climate Finance Foundation to leverage the AWS Cloud and the many Petabytes of climate-relevant data we are making available through the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative to push this project forward.”

Ceres
“Climate risk is mispriced all across financial markets, and that’s blocking transition to a low carbon economy,” said Mindy Lubber, CEO of Ceres. “As Ceres found in our recent report, regulators, bank and investors urgently need open access to corporate climate-related data and better tools for scenario analysis.”

Microsoft
“Addressing climate issues in a meaningful way requires people and organizations to have access to data to better understand the impact of their actions. Opening up and sharing our contribution of significant and relevant sustainability data through the LF Climate Finance Foundation will help advance the financial modeling and understanding of climate change impact – an important step in affecting positive change. We’re excited to collaborate with the other founding members and hope additional organizations will join,” said Jennifer Yokoyama, Microsoft Chief IP Counsel.

SASB
“LF Climate Finance Foundation’s OS-Climate platform enables analysis of how companies would perform on standardized, financially material metrics under various climate conditions and scenarios,” said Matthew Welch, President & COO of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Foundation. “We see investor demand for this kind of standardized comparison of companies manifest in the recommendations of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures and in the more than 3,000 corporate signatories to the UN Principles for Responsible Investing.”

S&P Global
Martina Cheung, President of S&P Global Market Intelligence, said: “Businesses and investors are acknowledging the global climatic changes and its impact on the future performance of companies. There is an increasing demand from pension funds, asset managers and governments for climate related data to incorporate into their decision-making. Now more than ever, there’s a need for greater company disclosure of climate and environmental data as well as continued advancement in data and analytical tools to better assess climate risks and opportunities.”

 

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

 

 

# # #
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

 

Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
503-867-2304
pr@linuxfoundation.org

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Over the last few decades, we’ve seen Linux steadily grow and become the most widely used operating system kernel. From sensors to supercomputers, we see it used in spacecraft, automobiles, smartphones, watches, and many more devices in our everyday lives. Since the Linux Foundation started publishing the Linux Kernel Development Reports in 2008, we’ve observed progress between points in time. 

Since that original 1991 release, Linux has become one of the most successful collaborations in history, with over 20,000 contributors. Given the recent announcement of version 5.8 as one of the largest yet, there’s no sign of it slowing down, with the latest release showing a new record of over ten commits per hour.

In this report, we look at Linux’s entire history. Our analysis of Linux is based on early releases, and the developer community commits from BitKeeper and git since the first Kernel release on September 17, 1991, through August 2, 2020. With the 5.8 release tagging on August 2, 2020, and with the merge window for 5.9 now complete, over a million commits of recorded Linux Kernel history are available to analyze from the last 29 years. 

This report looks back through the history of the Linux kernel and the impact of some of the best practices and tooling infrastructure that has emerged to enable one of the most significant software collaborations known. 

Download 2020 Linux Kernel History Report

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Click the image above to read the August 2020 newsletter Click here to read the Linux Foundation Training newsletter

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New Linux Foundation effort to increase education and best practices for emerging cloud financial management discipline attracts founding members; representatives from Apptio, Google and VMware appointed to new Technical Advisory Council

San Francisco, Calif., August 20, 2020 –  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the formation of the FinOps Foundation to advance the discipline of cloud financial management through best practices, education and standards. The Linux Foundation announced an intent to form the FinOps Foundation at Open Source Summit North America in late June. Today it’s announcing formation and support from founding members Apptio, Cloudeasier, Cloudsoft, CloudWize, Contino, Kubecost, Neos, Opsani, ProsperOps, Timspirit and VMware.

The newly formed Technical Advisory Council welcomes representatives from Apptio, Google and VMware alongside existing practitioner member seats held by individuals from Atlassian, Nationwide and Pearson. The TAC’s charter requires a combination of appointed and elected members and end-user practitioners who will be added in the coming months. The initial TAC members include:

• Eugene Khvostov, VP of Product & Engineering at Apptio
• Matt Leonard, Product Management lead for Google Compute Cloud billing
• John McLoughlin, Director of Product Management for CloudHealth by VMware
• Mike Fuller, Principal Systems Engineer for FinOps at Atlassian
• Joseph Daly, Director of Cloud Optimization at Nationwide
• Ashley Hromatko, Sr. Mgr FinOps at Pearson

“With demand for new collaboration to support cloud procurement between IT and finance teams, the FinOps community is growing fast,” said J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation. “We have the infrastructure and governance in place to support this acceleration and provide best-in-class training and education opportunities to grow this discipline. Our founding members are making this possible with today’s commitments, and we look forward to working with them in the years to come.”

“We are thrilled to see the FinOps Foundation formalize their launch at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon where efficiency and cloud financial management is becoming a growing concern,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). “CNCF looks forward to collaborating with the FinOps Foundation to improve cloud financial management for all.”

Also launching today is the formalization of the FinOps Certified Platform, FinOps Service Certified Service Provider and Training Partner programs.

FinOps Certified Platform (FCP) is a pre-qualified tier of vetted technology providers who offer software solutions to successfully adopt cloud financial management practices. Launch partners include Apptio Cloudability, CloudHealth by VMware, CloudWize, Kubecost, Opsani and ProsperOps.

FinOps Certified Service Provider (FCSP) is a pre-qualified tier of vetted service providers who have deep experience helping enterprises successfully adopt cloud financial management practices. The FCSP partners offer FinOps support, consulting, professional services and training for organizations embarking on their cloud financial management journey. Launch partners include Apptio, Cloudeasier, Cloudsoft, Contino, Neos and Timspirit.

FinOps Foundation recognizes a select group of FinOps Training Partners (FTP). This is a tier of vetted training providers who have deep experience in cloud financial management training. Launch partners include Apptio, Cloudeasier, Contino and VMware.

Training opportunities for members include the free edX course, Introduction to FinOps, launched by Linux Foundation and FinOps Foundation just this summer. The course is open for enrollment now. The FinOps Foundation also offers the FinOps Certified Practitioner Exam (FOCP). The FinOps landscape is depicted here: https://landscape.finops.org

The FinOps Foundation includes nearly 2000 individual practitioner members across the globe, representing more than 1200 companies. In the same way that DevOps revolutionized development by breaking down silos and increasing agility, FinOps increases the business value of cloud by bringing together technology, business and finance professionals with a new cultural set, knowledge skills and technical processes.

FinOps is the operating model for the cloud, which is resulting in a shift that combines systems, best practices, and culture to increase an organization’s ability to understand cloud costs and make informed business decisions. FinOps ensures that companies get the most value from every dollar spent in the cloud. It pushes accountability for spending to the edge where developers control purchasing decisions and provides a new set of centralized processes to maximize efficiency of purchases and the ability to allocate spending to teams.

For more information about the FinOps Foundation, please visit: https://www.finops.org/

Founding Member Quotes

Apptio
“Managing cloud costs and usage continues to be a top concern as cloud spending accelerates even faster than forecasted as a result of the business disruption, we’ve experienced this year. It’s been incredible to watch the FinOps Foundation grow from Cloudability’s Quarterly Customer Advisory Board meetings to a robust community dedicated to helping the industry manage cloud costs more effectively. We look forward to continuing our support of the Foundation’s efforts to standardize best practices and education for cloud financial management,” said Eugene Khvostov, VP of Product & Engineering at Apptio.

Cloudeasier
“Over recent years, most companies have experienced opening the ‘Pandora’s Box’ of the Public Cloud. The ease of consumption and availability of innovative services have been opposed by the necessity to understand, forecast, and report on the IT costs of every project. FinOps aims to solve this equation with the setup of processes, teams, and tools, which will make companies take full advantage of all Public Cloud benefits. As a FinOps pure player, it was an obvious choice for Cloudeasier to be part of the FinOps Foundation adventure. We are thrilled to participate, contribute, and learn, together with the Foundation, to set the next industry standard for Cloud Finance Management,” said Aymerc Thas-Pinot, CEO Cloudeasier.

Cloudsoft
“Cloudsoft is proud to be a member of the FinOps Foundation and we are excited to be part of the growing community focused on developing and sharing best practices in Cloud Financial Management. Our customers need to innovate without exploding costs. Therefore, the best practices established within the FinOps Foundation are crucial to gaining optimum business value from the cloud,” said Aled Sage, Head of FinOps at Cloudsoft.

CloudWize
“We see FinOps need in cloud cost-control, and optimization is on the rise. As a member of the FinOps Foundation, CloudWize provides a seamless solution that helps FinOps write policies to monitor and alert on undesired situations and prevent cost overhead. With CloudWize, FinOps analysts can query and search for misconfigurations and abnormal metrics that impact costs, without writing a single line of code,” said Yotam Atad, CEO of CloudWize.

Contino
“Contino is delighted to become a member of the FinOps Foundation. As organizations start to become more mature with their cloud adoption programs, many are recognizing the importance of adopting FinOps practices and Financial Agility as an integral part of their strategy. Working alongside the FinOps Foundation to create best practices, we will be able to better support our customers in creating modern Cloud Operating models by aligning their cloud adoption journey with spend-to-engineering efforts and business initiatives. We look forward to further sharing our experiences, whilst upskilling the community and our clients.”

Kubecost
“As more teams adopt Kubernetes and next generation cloud native technologies at scale, we are excited to be part of the community that is thinking deeply about how to help teams manage spend in these new environments. We look forward to developing more open source solutions to help benefit this growing community!” said Webb Brown, Kubecost co-founder.

Neos
“We are adamant in taking steps towards a positive change in Cloud financial management,” says Neos CEO Davorin Capan. “FinOps offers us necessary practices that facilitate our transition towards a truly ‘cloud-first’ strategy, bringing together technology, business and finance. Understanding the significance of this movement, we already have half a dozen of certified of FinOps practitioners in our team. Moreover, we are developing CloudVane, Multicloud Cost Management solution built on basic FinOps principles. We aim to include FinOps methodology into every consulting project, particularly in the form of turn-key solutions for our clients’ cloud demands.”

Opsani
“Optimizing cloud expenditures and managing workloads to be at their utmost efficiency is a paramount business concern as more businesses are shifting their traditional IT models to the cloud and implementing SaaS business lines. The FinOps Foundation is providing the essential service of highlighting best practices for managing cloud costs across the enterprise for better financial and computation results,” said Ross Schibler, CEO and Founder of Opsani, a leading Silicon Valley startup.

ProsperOps
“Cloud success cannot be achieved without Cloud Financial Management success and the FinOps Foundation is leading the way for every business to master this critical discipline. We’re thrilled to be a FinOps Certified Platform founding member and offer our service to practitioners looking to fully automate industry-leading savings outcomes,” said Chris Cochran, CEO of ProsperOps.

Timspirit
“For many years, Timspirit has been helping its customers understand, control and optimize their costs in an on-demand environment without any proven standards. We have also seen the emergence of the Cloud and FinOps, not only as an obvious source of savings, but also as an essential lever in reducing the carbon footprint of IT by sharing resources and improving efficiency. Timspirit is convinced that FinOps will become the ubiquitous discipline leading to a controlled, economical and sustainable IT. As a member of the FinOps Foundation, Timspirit is proud to work with our peers to offer our clients a shared FinOps framework based on market best practices.”

VMware
“Cloud financial management has never been more critical than it is right now. Organizations around the world are accelerating their cloud strategies while at the same time trying to control costs in a turbulent economic environment. The FinOps Foundation is doing important work to advance cloud financial management practices and practitioners. We’re excited to learn from FinOps Foundation members and contribute best practices we’ve gathered through our partnership with thousands of organizations worldwide,” said Joe Kinsella, vice president and CTO, CloudHealth by VMware.

 

About the FinOps Foundation

The FinOps Foundation (F2) is a nonprofit trade association made up of FinOps practitioners around the world. Grounded in real world stories, expertise and inspiration for and by FinOps practitioners, the F2 is focused on codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards to help community members and their teams become better at cloud financial management. For more information or to join, please visit: https://www.finops.org/

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,500 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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The ACRN Open Source Hypervisor for IoT Development Announces ACRN v2.0 and Functional Safety Certification Concept Approval

New hybrid-mode architecture expands the scope of the project to include industrial IoT and edge device use cases, delivers new flexibility in resource sharing across virtual machines and new levels of real-time and functional safety

How Laird Connectivity leverages Zephyr RTOS to create social distancing trackers

Laird Connectivity’s Sentrius BT710 wearable tracker/multi-sensor, which is based on Zephyr RTOS, is a great way to automate and simplify the challenges of social distancing and contact tracing.

OpenAPI Initiative Welcomes Postman as Newest Member

Postman joins 35 current members on the fast-growing initiative that includes Atlassian, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Bloomberg

LF Edge’s Fledge project announces release 1.8 that integrates with industry leaders like Google, Nokia, OSIsoft, ZEDEDA and Dianonic to enable open industrial edge software with AI/ML and Public Cloud Integration

Expanded community includes integrations and contributions from Google, Nokia, Flir, OSIsoft, Nexcom, RoviSys, Advantech, Wago, Zededa and Dianomic

LF Edge’s Akraino Project Release 3 Now Available, Unifying  OpenSource Blueprints Across MEC, AI, Cloud, and Telecom Edge

6 New R3 Blueprints (total of 20)  covering use cases across Telco, Enterprise, IoT, Cloud and more

[New White Paper] Sharpening the Edge: Overview of the LF Edge Taxonomy & Framework

This original, collaborative community-driven white paper details the new LF Edge taxonomy with the goal of clarifying market confusion by breaking the continuum down based on inherent technical and logistical tradeoffs rather than using ambiguous terms.

ONAP’s 6th Release, ‘Frankfurt,’ Available Now – Most Comprehensive, Secure and Collaborative Software to Accelerate 5G Deployments

Rich feature set including End-to-end 5G network slicing, security and deployment-ready automation anchored in Frankfurt

[New Guide] 5G Networking: An Introduction

Download this paper for an exploration of the business opportunities in 5G, the role of open source, Linux Foundation projects, and how to participate.

Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) Publishes Defining White Paper

Produced by Avid Think and Converge! Network Digest with DPDK community support, the paper outlines the critical role DPDK plays in the evolution of networking infrastructure while dispelling a number of myths and misconceptions about the technology.

Virtual LFN Developer & Testing Forum: June 2020 Report

See the quick highlights from the June event and the LFN workstreams in motion.

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From its efforts to reshape computing through open source to its aggressive push to increase internet connectivity around the world, Facebook is a leader in open innovation. Perhaps more important today than ever, Facebook’s focus on democratizing access to technology enhances opportunity and scale for individuals and businesses alike. That’s why we’re so excited to announce the company is joining the Linux Foundation at the highest level.

Facebook’s sponsorship of open innovation through the Linux Foundation will help support the largest shared technology investment in history with an estimated $16B in development costs of the world’s 100+ leading open source projects and supports those project communities through governance, events and education. The company is also already the lead contributor of many Linux Foundation-hosted projects, such as Presto, GraphQL, Osquery and ONNX. It has been an active participant in Linux kernel development, employing key developers and maintainers across major kernel subsystems.

In addition to these efforts, Facebook has a long history of leveraging open source to unlock the potential of open innovation:

• Through Facebook Connectivity and the open source Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Foundation, Facebook hopes to bring fast, reliable internet to those without it. Facebook’s Magma open source project allows telecom operators to easily deploy mobile networks in hard-to-reach areas — reducing the costs of building and maintaining telecom networks. Together, Facebook Connectivity and TIP have created hundreds of billions of dollars of value through open source collaboration.
• Facebook created a unique dataset of over 100,000 videos and launched the Deepfake Detection Challenge in order to accelerate development of new ways to detect deepfake videos. This open, collaborative effort will help the industry and society at large meet the challenge presented by deepfake technology and help everyone better assess the legitimacy of content they see online.
• Facebook’s Data for Good program enables geographic data to be shared with the aim of addressing some of the world’s greatest humanitarian issues, including COVID-19.
• Facebook also leads the industry in open hardware, having founded the Open Compute Project (OCP), which uses open source to enable the creation of efficient, flexible, and scalable hardware designs for data centers.
• By creating and sustaining an open source ecosystem around PyTorch, Facebook also accelerates the pace at which data scientists and developers can leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning in computer vision, natural language processing, and other disciplines.
• Facebook’s React.js library powers some of the world’s most popular websites and has become the standard for frontend web development due to its simplicity and flexibility.
• In working with Github to sponsor the first-ever remote open source fellowship run by Major League Hacking, Facebook also hopes to create a trend of empowering a new generation of diverse open source contributors.

Facebook’s commitment to the open source community can be seen in both its multi-million dollar investments and its genuine passion for technology development. It is this combination that makes the company an incredible supporter of the open source developer community.

As a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation, Facebook’s Kathy Kam joins the LF board. Kathy is head of Open Source at Facebook where she manages the Open Source Engineering, Developer Advocacy, and Open Source Program Management teams. Kathy is a 20-year engineering, product management, and developer relations leader previously with Google and Microsoft.

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The Linux Foundation would like to reiterate its statements and analysis of the application of US Export Control regulations to public, open collaboration projects (e.g. open source software, open standards, open hardware, and open data) and the importance of open collaboration in the successful, global development of the world’s most important technologies. At this time, we have no information to believe recent Executive Orders regarding WeChat and TikTok will impact our analysis for open source collaboration. Our members and other participants in our project communities, which span many countries, are clear that they desire to continue collaborating with their peers around the world.

As a reminder, we would like to point anyone with questions to our prior blog post on US export regulations, which also links to our more detailed analysis of the topic. Both are available in English and Simplified Chinese for the convenience of our audiences.

Click to read blog post on Open Source and Export Controls

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• 6 New R3 Blueprints (total of 20) covering use cases across Telco, Enterprise, IoT
• Akraino Blueprints cover areas including MEC, AI/ML, Cloud, Connected Vehicle, AR/VR, Android Cloud Native, smartNICs, Telco Core & Open- RAN, with — ongoing support for R1-R2 blueprints and more
• Community delivers open edge API specifications — to standardize across devices, applications (cloud native), orchestrations,  and multi-cloud — via new white paper 

SAN FRANCISCO –  August 12, 2020 – LF Edge, an umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced the availability of Akraino Release 3 (“Akraino R3”).  Akraino’s third and most mature release to date delivers fully functional edge solutions– implemented across global organizations– to enable a diversity of edge deployments across the globe. New blueprints include a focus on  MEC, AI/ML, and Cloud edge. In addition, the community authored the first iteration of a new white paper to bring common open edge API standards to align the industry. 

Launched in 2018, and now a Stage 3 (or “Impact” stage) project under the LF Edge umbrella, Akraino Edge Stack delivers an open source software stack that supports a high-availability cloud stack optimized for edge computing systems and applications. Designed to improve the state of carrier edge networks, edge cloud infrastructure for enterprise edge, and over-the-top (OTT) edge, it enables flexibility to scale edge cloud services quickly, maximize applications and functions supported at the edge, and to improve the reliability of systems that must be up at all times. 

“Akraino has evolved into a fully-functional edge stack,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “With a growing set of blueprints that enable more and more use cases, we are seeing the power of open source impact every aspect of the edge and how the world accesses and consumes information.”  

About Akraino R3

Akraino Release 3 (R3) delivers a fully functional open source edge stack that enables a diversity of edge platforms across the globe. With R3, Akraino Edge Stack  brings deployments and PoCs from a swath of global organizations including Aarna Networks, China Mobile, Equinix, Futurewei, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, Nokia, NVIDIA, Tencent, WeBank, WiPro, and more.

Akraino enables innovative support for new levels of flexibility that scale 5G, industrial IoT, telco, and enterprise edge cloud services quickly, by delivering community-vetted and tested edge cloud blueprints to deploy edge services.  New use cases and new and existing blueprints provide an edge stack for Connected Vehicle, AR/VR, AI at the Edge, Android Cloud Native, SmartNICs, Telco Core and Open-RAN, NFV, IOT, SD-WAN, SDN, MEC, and more. 

 Akraino R3 includes 6 new blueprints for a total of 20, all tested and validated on real hardware labs supported by users and community members — the Akraino community has established a full-stack, automated testing with strict community standards to ensure high-quality blueprints. 

The 20 “ready and proven” blueprints, include both updates and long-term support to existing R1 & R2 blueprints, and the introduction of six new blueprints:

• The AI Edge – School/Education Video Security Monitoring
• 5G MEC/Slice System–  Supports Cloud Gaming, HD Video, and Live Broadcasting
• Enterprise Applications on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge (EATLEdge)
• Micro-MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) for SmartCity Use Cases
• IEC Type 3: Android Cloud Native Applications on Arm®-based  Servers on the Edge 
• IEC Type 5: Smart NIC: Edge hardware acceleration 

More information on Akraino R3, including links to documentation, code, installation docs for all Akraino Blueprints from R1-R3, can be found here. For details on how to get involved with LF Edge and its projects, visit https://www.lfedge.org/. 

API  White Paper

The Akraino community published the first iteration of a  new white paper to bring common open edge API standards to the industry. The new white paper makes available, for the first time, generic edge APIs for developers to standardize across devices, applications (cloud native), orchestrations,  and multi-cloud. The paper serves as a stepping stone for broad industry alignment on edge definitions, use cases, APIs. Download the paper here: https://www.lfedge.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Akraino_Whitepaper.pdf

Looking Ahead

The community is already planning R4, which will include more implementation of open edge API guidelines, more automation of testing, increased alliance with upstream and downstream communities, and development of public cloud standard edge interfaces. Additionally, the community is expecting new blueprints as well as additional enhancements to existing blueprints. 

Don’t miss the Open Networking and Edge Summit (ONES) virtual event happening September 28-29, where Akraino and other LF Edge communities will collaborate on the latest open source edge developments. Registration is now open!

Ecosystem Support for Akraino R3

Arm
“The demands on compute, networking, and storage infrastructure are changing significantly as we connect billions of intelligent devices, many of which live at the edge of the 5G network,” said Kevin Ryan, senior director of software ecosystem development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “By working closely with the Akraino community on the release of Akraino R3, and through our efforts with Project Cassini for seamless cloud-native deployments, Arm remains committed to providing our partners with full- edge solutions primed to take on the 5G era.”

AT&T 
Mazin Gilbert, VP of Technology and Innovation, AT&T, said: “As a founding member of the Akraino platform, AT&T has seen first-hand the remarkable progress as a result of openness and industry collaboration. AI and edge computing are essential when it comes to creating an intelligent, autonomous 5G network, and we’re proud to work together with the community to deliver the best possible solutions for our customers.”

Baidu
“In the 5G era, AI+ Edge Computing is not only an important guarantee for updating the consumer and industrial Internet experience (such as video consumption re-upgrading, scene-based AI capabilities, etc.), but also a necessary infrastructure for the development of the Internet industry,” said Ning Liu, Director of AI Cloud Group, Baidu. “Providing users with AI-capable edge computing platforms, products and services is one of Baidu’s core strategies. Looking towards the future, Baidu will continue to adhere to the core strategy of open source and cooperate with partners to build a more open and improved ecosystem.” 

China Unicom
“Commercial 5G is going live around the world. Edge computing will play an important role for large bandwidth and low delay services in the 5G era. The key to the success of edge computing is to provide integrated ICT PaaS capabilities, which is beneficial for the collaboration between networks and services, maximizing the value of 5G,” said Xiongyan Tang, Chief Scientist and CTO of the Network Technology Research Institute of China Unicom. “The PCEI Blueprint will define a set of open and common APIs, to promote the deep cooperation between operators and OTTs, and help to build a unified network edge ecosystem.”  

Huawei 
“High bandwidth, low latency, and massive connections are 5G typical features. Based on MEC’s edge computing and open capabilities, 5G network could build the connection, computing, and capabilities required by vertical industries and enables many applications. In the future, 5G MEC will be an open system that provides an application platform with rich atomic capabilities,” said by Bill Ren, Huawei Chief Open Source Liaison Officer. “Managing a large number of applications and devices on the MEC brings great challenges and increases learning costs for developers. We hope to make 5G available through open source, so that more industry partners and developers can easily develop and invoke 5G capabilities. Build a common foundation for carriers’ MEC through open source to ensure the consistency of open interfaces and models. Only in this way can 5G MEC bring tangible benefits to developers and users.”

Juniper Networks
“Juniper Networks is proud to have been an early member of the Akraino community and supportive of this important work. We congratulate this community for introducing new blueprints to expand the use cases for managed edge cloud with this successful third release,” said Raj Yavatkar, Chief Technology Officer at Juniper Networks. “Juniper is actively involved in the integration of multiple blueprints and we look forward to applying these solutions to evolve edge cloud and 5G private networks to spur new service innovations – from content streaming to autonomous vehicles.”

Tencent
“The new generation network is coming, IoT and Edge Computing are developing rapidly. At the same time, it also brings great challenges to technological innovation. High performance, low latency, high scalability, large-scale architecture is a must for all applications. TARS has released the latest version to meet the adjustment of 5G and Edge Computing. Massive devices can easily use TARS Microservice Architecture to realize the innovation of edge applications. The Connect Vehicle Blueprint and AR/VR Blueprint in Akraino are all using the TARS Architecture,” said Mark Shan, Chairman of Tencent Open Source Alliance, Chairman of TARS Foundation, and Akraino TSC Member. “The blueprints on the TARS Architecture solve the problem of high throughput and low latency. TARS is a neutral project in the Linux Foundation, which can be easily used and helped by anyone from the open-source community.”

Zenlayer
“We are proud to be part of the Edge Cloud community. Zenlayer is actively exploring edge solutions and integrating the solutions to our bare metal product. We hope the edge products will empower rapid customer innovation in video streaming, gaming, enterprise applications and more,” said Jim XU, chief engineering architect of Zenlayer.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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Grillo is open sourcing ‘OpenEEW,’ its IoT-based earthquake early-warning system that will accelerate the creation of low-cost, community-driven projects around the world, with support from IBM, USAID, the Clinton Foundation and Arrow Electronics

San Francisco, Calif., Aug. 11, 2020 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host Grillo’s OpenEEW project in collaboration with IBM to accelerate the standardization and deployment of earthquake early-warning systems (EEWs) for earthquake preparedness around the world. The project includes the core components of the Grillo EEW system comprised of integrated capabilities to sense, detect and analyze earthquakes as well as alert communities. OpenEEW was created by Grillo with support from IBM, USAID, the Clinton Foundation and Arrow Electronics.

Earthquakes often have the most severe consequences in developing countries, due in part to construction and infrastructure issues. Timely alerts have the potential to help save lives in the communities where earthquakes pose the greatest threat. EEW systems provide public alerts in countries including Mexico, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, but nearly three billion people globally live with the threat of an earthquake and don’t have access to nation-wide systems, which can cost upwards of one billion U.S. dollars. OpenEEW wants to help reduce the costs of EEW systems, accelerate their deployments around the world and has the potential to save many lives.

“The OpenEEW Project represents the very best in technology and in open source,” said Mike Dolan, Senior Vice President and GM of Projects at the Linux Foundation. “We’re pleased to be able to host and support such an important project and community at the Linux Foundation. The open source community can enable rapid development and deployment of these critical systems across the world.”

The OpenEEW Project includes several core IoT components: sensor hardware and firmware that can rapidly detect and transmit ground motion; real-time detection systems that can be deployed on various platforms from a Kubernetes cluster to a Raspberry Pi; and applications that allow users to receive alerts on hardware devices, wearables, or mobile apps as quickly as possible. The open source community aims to help advance earthquake technology by contributing to OpenEEW’s three integrated technology capabilities: deploying sensors, detecting earthquakes and sending alerts.

“For years we have seen that EEWs have only been possible with very significant governmental financing, due to the cost of dedicated infrastructure and development of algorithms. We expect that OpenEEW will reduce these barriers and work towards a future where everyone who lives in seismically-active areas can feel safe,” said Andres Meira, Founder, Grillo.

IBM and The Linux Foundation have a rich history of deploying projects that fundamentally make change and progress in society through innovation – and remain committed during COVID-19. The winner of the 2018 Call for Code Global Challenge, Project Owl, contributed its IoT device firmware in March 2020 as the ClusterDuck Protocol, and now, Grillo’s OpenEEW is the most recent project to be open sourced for communities that need them most.

Originally connected to Grillo through the Clinton Foundation at a convening of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Action Network, IBM is now playing a role supporting Grillo by adding the OpenEEW earthquake technology into the Call for Code deployment pipeline supported by The Linux Foundation.

IBM has deployed a set of six of Grillo’s earthquake sensor hardware and is conducting tests in Puerto Rico, complementing Grillo’s tools with a new Node-RED dashboard to visualize readings. IBM is also extending a Docker software version of the detection component that can be deployed to Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift on the IBM Cloud.

“IBM is thrilled to continue collaborating with Grillo and to contribute to the new open source OpenEEW project with The Linux Foundation,” said Daniel Krook, Chief Technology Officer, Call for Code. “Grillo technology has the potential to help save lives, which is just the type of innovation we look for in Call for Code projects. This is an exciting opportunity for the developer community to help us improve the software, hardware, and global network as an open source project.”

Grillo sensors have generated more than 1TB of data since 2017 in Mexico, Chile, Puerto Rico and Costa Rica, including information from large earthquakes of magnitudes 6 and 7. Researchers from Harvard University and the University of Oregon are already working with this data, which will enable new machine learning earthquake characterization and detection methods.

“Understanding the ground on which Mexico City is built is an important facet of earthquake hazards. With support from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, we are working with Grillo to deploy a dense network of sensors across Mexico City and analyze the seismic behavior and local seismicity beneath the ancient lake basin. Our collaboration also enables open source software development for the next generation of seismology on the cloud,” said Harvard Professor Maine Denolle.

The primary aim of the project is to encourage a variety of people – makers, data scientists, entrepreneurs, seismologists – to build EEWs in places like Nepal, New Zealand, Ecuador, and other seismic regions. This community may also contribute to OpenEEW by advancing the sensor hardware design, improving detection and characterization of earthquakes through machine learning, and creating new methods for delivering alerts to citizens.

For more information and to begin contributing, please visit:

• https://github.com/openeew/openeew
• https://openeew.com/
• https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/code-and-response/

 

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,500 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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