Open-Orchestrator (Open-O), an open-source management and network operations (MANO) project with roots in China, was officially announced today at Mobile World Congress.

While SDxCentral reported Open-O’s existence more than a month ago, perhaps the bigger news is that it will be a Linux Foundation project, and Huawei is contributing $30 million to it.

The Linux Foundation announced its intent to form the Open-O unified orchestrator project for software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) at a press conference hosted with China Mobile and Huawei.

In addition to the $30 million during the next three years, Huawei is committing more than 50 developers and establishing two open-source labs, one for SDN and one for NFV.

The vendor is making a big splash in open source this year. Earlier this month, Huawei said it wants to build a complete open source networking stack and is methodically tapping open source groups to do so.

Open-O is “China born” but “global in nature,” according to the three announcing partners.

“Traditionally, Chinese companies have been fast followers of open source,” says Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “This is different. This code comes out of China. From Linux’s perspective, there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese developers that we’ve just brought to the table.”

Other early supporters of Open-O include Brocade, China Telecom, Ericsson, F5, Intel, KT, Red Hat, Riverbed, and ZTE, among others.

The timing of Open-O comes just a couple days after the announcement of Open Source MANO (OSM), which is hosted by ETSI and initially integrates open source software from Telefónica, Canonical, and Rift.io.

Asked why the world needs two new open source MANO groups, Zemlin says, “At this level of the stack, it’s all goodness. Often in open source, you see projects that overlap.”

Both OSM and Open-O intend to apply for Apache 2.0 licenses, so they will be comparable in that way. But the Open-O partners stress that their open source group will set up an orchestrator for both SDN and NFV, which Zemlin says may be of a bigger scope than the OSM project.

Besides Open-O and OSM, in December 2015 the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) voted to extend its scope to MANO, as well. OPNFV is also a Linux Foundation project.

Zemlin says, “OPNFV will be a downstream integrator. This [Open-O] would be an upstream component that OPNFV would consider integrating.”