Motorola will form an industry-wide consortium that will assume stewardship for the "OpenSAF" project, which seeks to establish a broadly adopted high availability operating environment that can be leveraged by computing technology companies, network equipment providers (NEPs) and other industries requiring high availability.
Motorola also announced the first release of the open source code related to the project. The consortium also will manage any future development of the OpenSAF code base. Leading companies including Ericsson, HP and Nokia Siemens Networks have expressed support for this initiative.
Supporters of OpenSAF argue that it will enable more efficient use of in-house software engineering resources, and additional tools will be provided to enable application development and deployment services. Independent software vendors (ISVs) will be able to use OpenSAF as a benchmark for creating highly available applications. OpenSAF includes an implementation of the Service Availability Forum Application Interface Specification (AIS).
The goals of the OpenSAF project are as follows:
- Create an open source implementation of a high availability operating environment which includes the SA Forum Application Interface Specification (AIS)
- Develop necessary additional complementary services necessary to deploy and manage the software
- Help accelerate the development of SA Forum specifications by proposing enhancements
- Establish a broadly adopted high availability operating environment that can be leveraged by computing technology companies, NEPs, and other industries requiring high availability, and ISVs.
- Utilize an open source licensing model not tied to any commercial implementation.
