We heard rumors that the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and the OpenDaylight Project (ODL) were considering merging. Our sources were correct. However, Huawei — which participates in both groups — says it's not going to happen.

Ayush Sharma, CTO of IP with Huawei, says his team conducted a competitive analysis of the two open source projects and came to the conclusion they should not merge.

The Linux Foundation, which manages both ONOS and ODL, didn't have an official comment but indicated it was still watching how things shake out.

There is a general desire within the software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) communities to consolidate open source coding work. Many have complained that there are too many open source projects. And from the standpoint of vendors and service providers, it’s a hassle and an expense to dedicate people to multiple groups.

But after its analysis, Huawei concluded that the architectures of ONOS and ODL are too distinct to combine.

“We’re not claiming any winners or losers,” says Sharma. “ONOS’s core architecture is more suited to service providers, and ODL was from the data center principally and is for enterprises. The architectures are central and distributed. Those are too difficult to converge into one. ONOS is working in the central office and ODL for the smart city.”

ONOS just this year joined with the Linux Foundation. At that time, some suggested ONOS and ODL were too similar to remain separate projects. But Sharma says another reason not to merge is that the two groups have fundamentally different communities. The ONOS community is deep; it’s focused on particular service provider use cases. ODL is more broad with lots of contributions from a lot of partners.

Just this week, Ciena announced its Blue Planet division plans to offer a commercial version of ONOS in early 2016. And Israel-based ECI said it is developing an ONOS-based SDN controller.