Another leader of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has departed. Rick Bauer, formerly the head of standards at ONF, announced his departure on LinkedIn. He already has a new position lined up as director of certifications for MEF (formerly known as Metro Ethernet Forum).

Bauer had been with the ONF for about four and a half years. As the head of standards, he managed the technical working groups, standards development, and special projects within the organization.

The ONF has undergone some significant changes the last few months, beginning with the resignation of Dan Pitt as executive director in September.

In October the ONF announced it was merging with On.Lab. Although ONF will retain its name after the merger is complete in 2017, it will effectively be run by On.Lab.

On.Lab also oversees the open source projects ONOS and the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD). And Guru Parulkar, in his position as executive director of On.Lab, oversees all three groups: ONF, ONOS, and CORD.

There’s some tension in the software-defined networking (SDN) world between standards work and open source work.

In an email to SDxCentral, Bauer said, “I don't see that tension necessarily has to be there. During my years at ONF, we created or curated over 30 open source projects, some that grew out of information modeling and other standards-related work (the EAGLE project at ONF's OpenSourceSDN repository immediately comes to mind). I don't see the inherent conflict that others see. These two are complementary (and often need to be complementary) versus being at odds with each other.”

He also pointed out that Google, which is an ONF board member company, updated IETF standards for DNS, TCP, HTTP, and SSL, and all of them were based on an “open source code first, standards later” approach.

Bauer's new gig is with MEF, a group that's involved with lifecycle services orchestration (LSO) for Ethernet connections, among other things.

And speaking of Ethernet, there’s also a connection between On.Lab and MEF. In March, MEF enlisted On.Lab as a partner to bring SDN to enterprise Ethernet services.

So whether it’s standards or open source, it’s all getting rather convoluted. The only clear thread is that On.Lab seems to be involved in all of it.