The ONF and P4.Org Complete Combination to Accelerate Innovation in Operator-Led Open Source

MENLO PARK, Calif., April 9, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) today announced that it has completed the combination with P4.org, and will host all P4 activities and working groups moving forward. The ONF will bring the P4 work under its umbrella of operator-led open source SDN projects, and, as with all ONF projects, the ONF will aim to strategically align P4 activities with the Linux Foundation to advance our shared mission of promoting open source as a tool for transformation and innovation.  The P4 project will continue to operate as before with minimal disruption while benefiting from strategic alignment with ONF and from ONF's operational infrastructure and expertise.

"The entire ONF team is extremely pleased to be joining with the P4 community to grow our combined ecosystem.  We see great synergy between all the ONF projects and P4, and our Stratum and COMAC projects are already making use of P4 in innovative ways.  More closely aligning our activities will be of benefit to both communities, and we expect P4 to play a pivotal role as we continue to pursue the broader Next-Generation SDN agenda," said Guru Parulkar, executive director and board member for the Open Networking Foundation.

"P4.org helped grow the fledgling P4 language into the de-facto industry standard way to describe how switches, routers and NICs process packets. The synergies with ONF are clear: Both organizations develop community-owned open-source software for networking. It's time for P4.org to be part of a larger, more established organization that can keep it open, independent and steadily growing for many more years to come," said Nick McKeown, Stanford Professor and co-founder and board member of the ONF and P4.org.

Practical Impact for P4 Members

Practically speaking, moving the P4 project under the umbrella of the ONF is intended to be minimally disruptive to the P4 community.  Specifically:

• All the P4 properties are still active (like p4.org, github.com/p4lang/, etc.)
• All P4 mailing lists remain active
• All P4 working groups remain active and under the same leadership
• All P4 members can continue to work on all P4 related activities
• As before, no fees are required to continue to participate in all P4 activities

About P4.org

The P4 Language Consortium is a non-profit organization building a thriving open source community dedicated to the use and improvement of the P4 language. It helps promote standardization and improvement of the P4 language and enables participants to develop new technologies that function in accordance with the P4 language specification. P4.org has over 100 members from industry and academia.

About the Open Networking Foundation:

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is an operator led consortium spearheading disruptive network transformation. Now the recognized leader for open source solutions for operators, the ONF first launched in 2011 as the standard bearer for Software Defined Networking (SDN). Led by its operator partners AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Google, NTT Group and Turk Telekom, the ONF is driving vast transformation across the operator space. For further information, visit http://www.opennetworking.org

SOURCE Open Networking Foundation

Related Links

https://p4.org/