In a keynote at the Interop conference, Frankovsky took the stage after a string of proprietary hardware vendor executives and made it very clear that he’s cut from a different kind of cloth.
“We haven’t heard the words open source yet this morning,” Frankovsky began.
That’s a situation that Frankovsky corrected by stressing time and again throughout his keynote that openness
and open source are the keys to the continued growth of the Internet. In his view, the closed and proprietary nature of hardware will only limit innovation.
The new group aims at nothing short of reworking the network hardware world as we know it.
“The network layer has been immune from the positive impact of open source,” Frankovsky said. “There has been lots of great work in OpenDaylight and OpenFlow, but, unfortunately, network hardware is still sold as a black box, as an appliance, and if I buy a switch, it comes with an OS on it.”
“Our vision: you should be able to build bare metal, have pre-boot, and get an OS to load and boot,” Frankovsky declared.
Read the full story at Enterprise Networking Planet:
Facebook’s Open Compute Launches Networking Project
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.