LFN reaches over 100 new members, furthers industry-wide harmonization

LOS ANGELES—​The LF Networking Fund (LFN) has reached 100 members in just three months, reflecting the growing momentum around the new group inside the Linux Foundation to drive collaboration across multiple open source projects.

Since launching in January 2018, LFN continues to add new members at various levels. Microsoft has deepened its commitment to open source networking by upgrading its membership to Gold, for example. 

Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking at the Linux Foundation, told FierceTelecom that membership interest in LFN has continued to rise in a very short amount of time.

RELATED: Linux Foundation introduces the LF Networking Fund, harmonizes​ open source, open standards

Linux Foundation
Arpit Joshipura

“LFN hit a milestone with 100 members in less than three months,” Joshipura said. “All of the top vendors are now involved, but the key new members are Swisscom, Telecom Italia and KDDI.”

In January, the Linux Foundation created LFN to bring some commonality across its myriad network efforts.

Already, nine of the ​top 10 open source networking projects have agreed to participate in LFN. The six founding projects of LFN are FD.io, OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, PDNA and SNAS. 

While the Harmonization 1.0 effort looked at open source networking projects, the Linux Foundation is now moving toward Harmonization 2.0. This initiative will consider how networking makes open source an enabler to adjacent ecosystems.

“As we start talking about adjacent communities, we’re going to announce several examples,” Joshipura said. “The first one will be the cloud, the edge with Akraino, the white box and OS via DANOS, and deep learning and AI via Acumos.”

Linux Foundation

The timing of LFN’s membership growth reflects the potential the analyst community sees in open source networking. A new report commissioned by ACG Research revealed that there is ongoing growth in network control, orchestration and the edge.

ACG Research has forecast that the network control and orchestration software markets are expected to double in size by 2023, while edge networking will see growth rates surpassing 100% year over year. Overall, $11 billion in current networking spend—$7 billion in hardware alone—is in play, according to ACG.

“As the market expands, open source will be the default choice for operators,” Joshipura said.

Joshipura added that “the more important thing is as we move forward the future strategic vendors are embracing open source whether it's open source projects or migration tools.”