LOS ANGELES – AT&T’s long-simmering plans to donate its Disaggregated Network Operating System (DANOS) open source code into the Linux Foundation is set to happen on Nov. 15. The move completes a process that was originally announced in early 2018.

DANOS is the open source version of AT&T’s Vyatta code that it acquired from Brocade in mid-2017. It’s an operating system for individual white boxes that make up a network, including support for AT&T’s growing 5G network.

The Linux Foundation will use the code as a base for contributions from other open source communities to build a standardized distributed network operating system (NOS).

AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch explained that the move is a “very similar playbook” to what the carrier has been doing around opening up and disaggregating software and hardware, routing and switching.

“We want to do the same thing in the RAN space,” Fuetsch said during a CTO panel discussion.

That playbook includes the carrier installing white box routers at more than 60,000 cell site locations that use a reference architecture it recently donated to the Open Compute Project.

“We have actually open sourced our routing stack that’s going into our cell site routers,” Fuetsch said. “This is basically the routing infrastructure that we need for 5G that will be at the base of all of our” cell sites.

The open source code will be slightly different from the DANOS-Vyatta version AT&T is using in its network. Arpit Joshipura, GM for Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, explained this week at the MWCLA 2019 event that the differences were mostly in AT&T removing the proprietary components of the code.

AT&T initially announced plans to donate that code to the Linux Foundation early last year. At that time, AT&T said the first code release would happen in late 2018.

“As important as the hardware is, the software is the future of our network,” Fuetsch said during that announcement. “We need an open and collaborative model. On these white box machines we are going to be running DANOS. We think DANOS is going to be revolutionary for service providers at all scales to adopt.”

As part of the code release, AT&T also signed an agreement with IP Infusion to act as a value-added integrator (VAI) of its DANOS-Vyatta edition of the software. This provides IP Infusion with exclusive rights to sell that software as a commercial product and provide the ongoing support to carriers and other customers.

“What we announced this morning is a partnership with a value-added integrator, IP Infusion, that will actually for operators that don't have the in-house expertise, that will actually harden that stack and provide the necessary operator support,” Fuetsch said. “So we think this is a tremendous of many other firsts putting out there that the industry can take advantage of.”

SDxCentral Editor Matt Kapko contributed to this story.

CORRECTION: Story and headline changed to correct spelling to IP Infusion.