Meet Me On The Equinox

Congratulations to all OpenDaylight founding partners, contributors, users and supporters. I am convinced this ambitious endeavor will redefine the meaning of “open source = collaboration”. This is a historic event, the coming of age of networking partners driving in the open source world, companies which until now, have been primarily preoccupied with driving open standards, though in many ways, resonating with the tenet of “running code and rough consensus” almost a generation before Open Source did. Perhaps this is, back to the future.

The announcement details are on the Consortium website at the Linux Foundation, contributions come in three categories, a multi protocol Controller platform contributed by Cisco, northbound (NB) applications on top, and southbound (SB) protocol drivers to support them from below. We expect that with such diverse community from the start, we will have a very open, diverse and collaborative development that will accelerate the growth and adoption of these projects for years to come.

Having been in this project from the very beginning, I would like to tell you exactly how and why we reached the open source model that we did, my own perspective in what I think is the key to getting that balance right. But later, not today.

Today is the day to celebrate all those diverse partners that were brought together by one singular desire to grow the market for application centered networking, to grow our collective ecosystem of users, developers, partners and customers, so that we can all win. With a rise in applications NB, more SB vendors will come and with a rise in SB support, more NB applications will arrive – the promise of the infinite feedback loop. I do not believe anyone out there should look for who wins and who loses; in this endeavor, this is a positive move for the industry, this is a win-win for everyone!

I think I’m going to play that “Meet Me On The Equinox” music and get into the OpenDaylight. It’s time to move forward and I hope everyone will.