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NTT Joins OSDL 81

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tiny-pink-phones-for-kernel-hackers? dept.
craigoda writes "NTT, the world's largest telecommunications company has joined the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) (Japanese) to focus on increasing the availability, clustering, and performance of Linux for use as the infrastructure OS in next generations telecommunications systems. NTT's work on Linux will be done through OSDL's Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) working group. Here is a Dow Jones Business story was released yesterday based on the rumour that NTT was joining. Looking at the OSDL web site, the rumour appears to be true."
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NTT Joins OSDL More

NTT Joins OSDL

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  • Reflects NTT's strategy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:45PM (#7056932)
    I used to work as consultant for NTT back in the mid-80s and they've always supported innovative strategies within the company. The folks at OSDL will be able to tap in large talent pool within the company.

    Which is nice.
    • I used to work as consultant for NTT back in the mid-80s

      Dude! Neat! I worked on a Commadore 64 in the mid eighties as well! My Dad bought one when they were damn near brand new (early eighties). It was really cool. It kinda sucked that most of my friends had Apple ][ or ][+, but it was still cool. I kicked ass at Bruce Lee. I have a Gentoo box now. Well, I'm slapping together a Win '98 box so I can play some games. AOK, AOK:TC, things like that. I play RTCW and Q3A and Tribes2 and thing like t

    • NTT's Plans: Good for Linux but Bad for Sun (Score:5, Interesting)

      by reporter ( 666905 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:08PM (#7057836) Homepage
      Within Japan, NTT laboratories have the same respect (among researchers) that AT&T laboratories once had before the breakup of Ma Bell. NTT joining the Open Source Development Laboratory (OSDL) to develop Linux will surely help to raise Linux's visibility and acceptance among Japanese high-technology companies. Moreover, NTT's work aggressively developing Linux at the OSDL will help to ensure the ultimate failure of Chinese attempts to recruit Japanese and Korean researchers to build an independent operating system (OS) that is incompatible with Windows or Linux. Please read "Asian trio to replace Windows [com.com]".

      Further, NTT joining the OSDL is extremely bad news for Sun Microsystems. NTT currently uses Solaris to run its group servers, but NTT is clearly committed to migrating all its servers from Solaris to Linux. NTT is the beginning of the Linux avalanche that will lock Sun computer systems out of the telecommunications market. (reference: " NTT Mulls Joining Global Consortium For Linux Development [yahoo.com]")

      ... from the desk of the reporter [geocities.com]

      • > [...] Chinese attempts to recruit Japanese and Korean researchers to build an independent operating system (OS) that is incompatible with Windows or Linux

        From your link "Asian trio to replace Windows":

        The move to jointly develop a server operating system that's based on Linux began in March with a meeting in Thailand of more than 100 software engineers from the three countries.

        (emphasis mine)

        So, I'd say NTTs involvement in OSDL seems quite in line with the govermental involvement of China, Japan

    • As a side note I worked for NTT subsidiary Verio in 2002, and was told we would not develop a certain product which I proposed, because it was to be hosted on Solaris, because it would "endanger our marketing dollars from Microsoft." And in general sales people were told not to lead with Unix/Linux solutions, only to provide them in case the customer asked. The company is still wondering why they're not making money.

  • NTT joining OSDL (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Alapan ( 600026 )
    Note it says "possibly". Also, Linux migration is going to take a long time, and they probably will support multiple operating systems anyway.

  • Go Nihon! (Score:3, Funny)

    by cgranade ( 702534 ) <cgranade@gmailPARIS.com minus city> on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:48PM (#7056963) Homepage Journal
    First, the Japanese gov't supports a Linux-based OS, now this. Gotta hand it to the Japanese! yokkatadesuyo!
    • Well, it's not just the Japanase - it's South Korea and, quite possibly, China, too. But I think they're driven by very pragmatic desires - the need for better handling of Asian alphabets by operating systems being chief among them. I suspect that if Microsoft had spent more time building this (in a meaningful way) into Windows, the three wouldn't have the urgency that they seem to show now.

  • Translation (Score:3, Funny)

    by Leffe ( 686621 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:48PM (#7056965)
    Here's the babelfish translation:

    No wait, it's here [altavista.com].

  • NTT joins OSDL (Score:4, Funny)

    by tandr ( 108948 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:49PM (#7056972)
    ... which is basically big "Fu.., sorry, Thank You, but No, thank you" to SCO even after memorable trip of McBride to Japan

  • Everything old is new again (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ekarjala ( 446184 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:54PM (#7057011)
    Bell Labs develops UNIX [bell-labs.com] as a development environment for next generation telecommunication systems. It grows to encompass a myriad of applications over the years. One day a bright young Finn hacks a derivative to run on commidity computing hardware. This derivative "Linux" is embraced first by hard core geeks for their own use (and as an expression of independence from various monolithic computing behemoths) and eventually, through the coding and evangelizing efforts of this user community, gains acceptance in enterprise level computing environments. Now NTT wants to use Linux as a platform for next generation data/telecomm applications...
    • Actually, Bell Labs UNIX as a document publishing system. Think ROFF, which evolved into TROFF and was GNU-ized into GROFF. It was never intended when first being developed to be for 'next generation telecommunications systems.' It certainly wasn't reliable enough for that until years after it was first developed. Furthermore, it was developed by a few individuals at Bell Labs, in a fairly unofficial project, running on an Old little-used DEC machine.

  • Yeah, but... (Score:1, Informative)

    by The Old Burke ( 679901 )
    The OSDL was founded in 2000. Its members currently include Alcatel, Cisco, Computer Associates, Dell, Ericsson, Force Computers, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Linuxcare, Miracle Linux Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric, MontaVista Software, NEC Corporation, Nokia, Red Hat, SuSE, Toshiba, and VA Software.
    And now NTT.
    But why are there not any American telecoms...?

    • Re:Yeah, but... (Score:4, Informative)

      by chill ( 34294 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @02:09PM (#7057135) Journal
      But why are there not any American telecoms...?

      The American telecom equipment would be Lucent, Nortel, Juniper, Ciena and a couple of others. None are in a financial position to do anything. They're not investing in a lot of R&D at the moment other than continuing existing projects.

      Lucent uses Sun Solaris and HP-UX for systems control, depending on which equipment you are talking about -- ATM/FR or DWDM/Sonet/SDH. There was a pilot program initiated about a year ago in partnership with IBM Global Services to test Linux out in certain situations. I have no idea where that is at right now.

      Nortel uses Red Hat in some situations. Actually, so did Lucent. Check out the bullet points in http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press _Q12002.html

      I've seen Red Hat boxes -- rows of them -- used in Verizon (Dell servers), AT&T, Williams Communications, Sprint and others.

  • Memo (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:55PM (#7057023) Homepage Journal
    From: Darl McBride

    To: Renaissance Ventures

    Subject: We have 'em on the run!

    Did you hear that NTT joined with OSDL? They'll be working on our
    Linux OS for all new projects! Obviously they have come to their
    senses, email from "l337_d00dx0rzz@hotmail.com" said that NTT would
    be sending us a large sum of money for licensing.

    Darl

    ps: we *could* use another $500 or $600K to make this month's payroll.

  • I'm confused (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:59PM (#7057058)
    Slashdot needs to provide a list of corporations approved by the geek collective, so I can skip reading and get right to the knee-jerk reaction.
    • Anything that has to do with Japan is cool.

      Any company that is headquartered in Japan is approved and good.

      If you see the text, "NTT" or "Japan" than you must have a positive knee-jerk reaction, and say things like, "The island of Japan is doing wonderful things to promote the open source initiative, and they truly grasp what open source is. As well as having hot (japanese school girls|blue or pink haired chicks|big robots!)
      • Anything that has to do with Japan is cool.

        Wait... Sony is from Japan. This whole slash-bot thing is harder than it used to be.
        • Wait... Sony is from Japan. This whole slash-bot thing is harder than it used to be.

          They make the Aibo, they have to be cool.

          No anchovies? You have the wrong man.
          • They make the Aibo, they have to be cool.

            But they are an RIAA member. Hence the confusion.
            • But they are an RIAA member. Hence the confusion.

              That is Sony America. Sony, as in the Japanese company, isn't. Yes, it's a wholly owned subsidiary, but it is a (mostly) separate entity.
            • Their involvement in the RIAA is vastly overshadowed by the Playstation. I would like to think of Sony as the cool kid who's just presently hanging out with a bad crowd.
    • you say that jokingly, but having a list that you can use to show that linux is legit, and can be used in the business workspace would be helpful... like ibm, who spent 1 billion on linux in a year, showing that IBM supports linux, gves linux credibility.
  • You can read the translated Japanese site here [excite.co.jp].

  • Love NTT Technology (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Having lived in Japan a few years this does not suprise me. NTT always had excellent phones for the end users, with features that I still have not seen over here. Back in 1996 I was connecting at 56k through a cellphone, something we just barely are starting to see over here. Another nice thing was that half the payphones had built in data ports and ISDN connections.
  • 1) What were the alternatives?

    2) How much money will this save? I imagine into the billions, especially if it extends to a US telecomm switch to Linux. This is just one more step to open-source acceptability! :)

  • YES! Does this mean... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:06PM (#7057800) Journal
    This pleases me greatly. Does this mean we can expect to see NTT's TwinVQ (ie, VQF as popularized by the Yamaha encoder but technically belonging to NTT) made open source sometime in the near future?

    For those unaware of VQF, it performs noticeably better than MP3 at compressing audio (at 96Kbps, it perorms better than even MP3Pro, though takes about 10x as long to encode). For some reason (cough cough money cough) only a 96Kbps encoder ever made it out to the general public, but many people who used and loved it have long awaited a higher bitrate version.

    C'mon, NTT, you've got an otherwise dead and useless code base. Let us play!
    • bah, i was one of the first to help suport vqf back in the day, i had the third largest collection on the IRC network we traded on... i listen to them comparied to an average MP3 and they sound like ass compaired to the highest quality encoded MP3.. MP+ sounded better then VQF, and most mp3s (different form of vairable bitrate mp3)

      Not a troll or flamebait but VQF quite honestly sounds like trash through anything but a 5$ set of speakers...
      • i listen to them comparied to an average MP3 and they sound like ass compaired to the highest quality encoded MP3

        And MP3 sounds like crap compared to the highest quality PCM (ie, a raw CD rip). I certainly won't disagree with you there, but I think you make an unfair comparison. No, a 96Kbps VQF doesn't sound like a 384Kbps MP3. But I'd certainly like to hear what a 384Kbps (possibly VBR?) VQF would sound like...

  • Could save tons of money, but.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by addikt10 ( 461932 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:26PM (#7058043)
    The cost of Sun's telco gear, with Vertas clustering and journalling software borders on insane for a large installation, so the long term economic benifits for NTT are obvious.

    However, in my experience, a company as large as NTT would have signed NDA's with both Sun and Veritas to see what was coming in the next releases of their software, and to provide input into the design features.

    I wonder if these agreements will allow NTT to do anything but help fund development of these features.

  • Translation of the Japanese article (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    [My comments are in square brackets. I didn't translate portions that explained what Linux is, and what OSDL is, because we're all clued in about that by now.]

    NTT group plans to deliver a high-performance OS, capable of various telecommunications services, in three years. It will reduce the cost of development and operation of basic telecommunication. Linux, which has previously seen action in the public sector such as Denshi Seifu ["Electronic Government" -- some sort of Japanese buzzword] has also begun
  • I noticed on all recent ODSL press releases, it says:

    About the Open Source Development Lab

    OSDL - home to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux - ...

    For some reason I find this funny. Do they have Linus stuffed in some rack unit there? Maybe Finland should change it's name to "Finland - Linus Torvalds was born here".

  • Just a side note. The Tokyo Linux Users Group's server is currently being hosted by OSDL. Thank you OSDL guys. We just changed the network settings yesterday since they shifted to a new ISP. From this report I guess it's NTT.
  • Gee, another hardware company weighs in behind Free Software. The folks who crank out millions of blinkey-light boxes see hard economics at work here: Use Linux, don't have to hire expensive code-boys to worry about which O(1) scheduler to use. Can even afford to pitch in to the effort through places like OSDL with the MILLIONS saved in software development costs.

    SATPO*: Solaris coders are a dying breed, costing their mother company big bucks to produce something that can be had for free, and they can't

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