Kicking off the Open Networking Summit, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is launching its first-ever app.

Don't freak out. This doesn't mean the ONF is going commercial, nor does it mean the ONF is out to compete with its constituents. The app — a network tap called SampleTap — is intended to be an educational tool, a My First App for OpenFlow beginners. Because network tapping is non-invasive, operators can experiment with SampleTap on live networks without endangering those networks or their businesses.

“It's a minimally disruptive way of giving people an educational product using OpenFlow,” says Dan Pitt, the ONF's executive director. “The focus on the app is not the tapping part, per se — it's about OpenFlow and what it takes to run it in OpenDaylight.”

Pitt will be announcing SampleTap during his ONS keynote tonight.

SampleTap was developed by Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Wiretap Labs, which will be chronicling the app's development in a series of blogs on the ONF site. (Wiretap is related to SDxCentral; see disclosure below.)

There are no plans to turn SampleTap into a commercial product. The network tap is the SDN equivalent of hipsters' skinny jeans; you see them everywhere (well, in at least eight vendors' portfolios, by Pitt's count), and adding one more to the fray would be silly, not to mention counter to the ONF's objective of helping its members by advancing the SDN cause.

“We're serious about making this stuff work and about commercial success for SDN. We're not just a standards organization,” Pitt says.

SampleTap is based on OpenFlow 1.0 and was designed to run on an OpenDaylight controller. (The OpenDaylight Hydrogen release, which supports OpenFlow 1.3, wasn't available when work on the app was beginning.) Wiretap has been testing the app on OpenFlow switches from NEC.

SampleTap will be available in a couple of weeks in the ONF's Github repository, along with some test cases. SampleTap will be offered under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

(Updated Mar. 6, 3:00 p.m.: The story has been corrected to say the development blogs will run on the ONF site, not here on SDxCentral.)

Disclosure: Wiretap Labs Inc. is affiliated with SDxCentral LLC. Roy Chua and Matthew Palmer, founders of SDxCentral LLC, are also investors and board members in Wiretap Labs.