The Linux Foundation (LF) today announced it has signed a collaboration agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create open source software that accelerates United States government technology research and development innovation.

Under the agreement, DARPA and the LF will create a broad collaboration umbrella US Government Open Programmable Secure (US GOV OPS) that allows United States Government projects, their ecosystem, and open community to participate in accelerating innovation and security in the areas of 5G, Edge, AI, Standards, Programmability, and IOT among other technologies. The project formation encourages ecosystem players to support US Government initiatives to create the latest in technology software.

The project will launch as a standard open source project with neutral governance and a charter similar to other projects within the Linux Foundation. Additionally, the agreement enables collaboration with upstream and downstream communities such as LF Networking, LF Edge, and Zephyr, among others, to build on a secure code base for use by the US Government.

“DARPA’s use of open source software in the Open Programmable Secure 5G (OPS-5G) program leverages transparency, portability and open access inherent in this distribution model,” said Dr. Jonathan Smith, DARPA Information Innovation Office Program Manager. “Transparency enables advanced software tools and systems to be applied to the code base, while portability and open access will result in decoupling hardware and software ecosystems, enabling innovations by more entities across more technology areas.”

 

“We are eager to ally with DARPA and its intent to accelerate secure, open source innovation and US competitiveness across breakthrough technologies,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, & IOT, the Linux Foundation. “This partnership enables transformational change across open software and systems, leveraging the best shared resources across the ecosystem.”

The new US GOV OPS umbrella will include the Open Programmable Secure- 5G (OPS-5G) program as its first project, currently in formation with the help of DARPA, the US Navy and additional performers. The goal of OPS-5G is to create open source software and systems enabling secure end to end 5G and follow-on mobile networks. OPS-5G will create capabilities to address feature velocity in open source software, mitigating large scale Botnet of Things (BoT), network slicing on suspect gear, and adaptive adversaries operating at scale.

DARPA’s Dr. Jonathan Smith will be presenting at the upcoming Open Networking and Edge Executive Forum (ONEEF) a virtual event taking place March 10-12. This special Executive Edition of Open Networking & Edge Summit, the industry’s premier open networking & edge computing event, will feature executive leadership across the networking and edge ecosystems sharing their visions with a global audience in the Telco, Cloud and Enterprise verticals.