Open source

Enhancing technology through open collaboration

What is open source?

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software that is provided with a license that grants rights for anyone to freely access, use, change and share the software for any purpose. Open source is developed in a collaborative and transparent way, and it is a thriving ecosystem for industry alignment and innovation.

How open source is driving the telecom industry?

Open source software has become an integrated part of the telecom industry product and service creation. Software such as Linux is in the heart of the modern telecom products and the introduction of the cloud native technologies further increase the importance of open source in the telecommunication ecosystem. Open source serves a dual role in the industry. Traditionally, open source software provides building blocks for the industry to use in product creation. More recently open source also serves as ecosystem creation mechanism providing interoperability and compatibility into areas where one implementation for the industry is adequate. Open source has grown to be an additional toolbox in the compatibility toolbox along with standardization.

Open source and Nokia

Nokia sees that collaborative software development through open source augments standardization. Standardization traditionally provides interoperability between different implementations. Open source on the other hand defines one, industry selected implementation. The collaborative development fits the best in areas where there is little differentiation between the participants allowing full collaboration.

Nokia has a long history in using and participating in open source. Over 25 years of open source experience has provided Nokia the expertise to select and position open source correctly in its products and in the investment to industry activities. Nokia has invested strongly into ensuring that the company is using open source responsibly. Nokia has an open source compliance program for over 20 years ensuring responsible and compliant open source usage, and started its Open Source Program Office (OSPO) a decade ago. Nokia announced conformance with OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230:2020 to manage open source license compliance management in its supply chain

Open source license compliance is of high priority for Nokia. In case of any questions or concerns please address the "Nokia FOSS inquiries response team" in a mail sent to Nokia Solutions and Networks Oy, Karakaari 7, Espoo, FI-02610, Finland.

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Nokia’s open source leadership

Recognizing early the importance of open source as a force shaping the industry ecosystem, Nokia has participated in, contributed to, and started multiple industry leading open source activities. One of Nokia’s first open source contributions was Robot Framework almost two decades ago.

Nokia has shaped the open source movement to cater for telecom and networking purposes by being a founding member of Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) as well as a founding member for projects like OPNFV (now integrated in Anuket), ONAP, Nephio, and a driver for projects such as OpenStack.

Nokia contributes to open source not only through technical contributions but also through helping to guarantee good governance and smooth operation of this industry collaboration. Manifestation of the investment include leadership positions in LF Networking, LF AI & Data, LF Europe, OpenFastPath, CAMARA, as well as multiple technical steering committee membership positions in relevant projects.

At Nokia, we leverage open source for innovation, and we contribute to the open source community to disseminate our inventive solutions. Explore our featured projects to discover new opportunities for the telecom industry.

Nephio is a Kubernetes-based intent-driven automation of network functions and the underlying infrastructure that supports those functions.

Anuket delivers a common reference model, architecture specifications, implementations and conformance tests for platforms and infrastructures to run telecom workloads.

Camara aims at defining service APIs by combining network APIs, over an operator domain.

LF AI & Data builds and supports an open artificial intelligence (AI) and data community, and drives open source innovation in the AI and data domains by enabling collaboration and the creation of new opportunities for all the members of the community.

OpenFastPath (OFP) Foundation aims to create and develop an open source fast path TCP/IP stack, designed to run in Linux user-space.

Containerlab provides a CLI for orchestrating and managing container-based networking labs. It starts the containers, builds a virtual wiring between them to create lab topologies of users choice and manages labs lifecycle.