A top AT&T executive said the company will launch its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (ECOMP) platform into open source by the first quarter of 2017. And the Linux Foundation will be the host of the open source project.

In a blog post, Chris Rice, SVP of AT&T Labs Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design, said that after the company developed ECOMP, it received a tremendous amount of feedback from service providers and virtual network function (VNF) providers that wanted more details about the platform. He also said the companies wanted AT&T to publicly state that it was going to open source the project.

That explains why the company last July made a big deal out of the fact that it was working with the Linux Foundation to help develop an organization around the project.

AT&T says it will have the necessary materials and use cases available to launch the platform into open source by the first part of 2017.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said in the post that ECOMP “is the most comprehensive and complete architecture for VNF/SDN automation we have seen.”