[April 17, 2013]

Open Networking Foundation Launches Industry's First Open-Source "OpenFlow™ Driver" Contest

OPEN (News - Alert) NETWORKING SUMMIT--The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced the industry's first competition to create an open-source "OpenFlow™ Driver." The competition is open to the worldwide development community to create an interoperable open-source implementation of the latest OpenFlow standard. ONF intends the competition to produce an OpenFlow driver that everyone from network equipment vendors and ISVs to operators, and larger open-source projects can use for easy transitions between different implementations of the OpenFlow protocol. The winner of the "OpenFlow Driver" competition will be awarded one grand prize of $50,000.

"ONF is committed to solving market needs in very practical ways," said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. "This competition is designed to encourage additional SDN innovation by seeking additional open-sourced technology solutions. We want this OpenFlow Driver to be of use for global developers of OpenFlow products, making it easier for them to build value around and easily update the OpenFlow protocol component with the latest ONF specifications as they evolve."

The competition is open to all organizations and indiviuals worldwide interested in developing an OpenFlow driver that any developer can use in a controller or switch to maintain compatibility among switches and controllers. The contest will open for submissions on April 16, 2013 at 12:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, and will close on August 15, 2013 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Judges, who will be selected by the Foundation, will critique on the following:

• Compliance with the OpenFlow specification standard
• Correctness of operation with test harness
• Ease with which the submission can be integrated into a controller
• Completeness of the implementation
• Clarity (News - Alert) of the code and architecture
• Memory footprint
• Potential performance and scaling of the architecture
• Portability of the code
• Modularity of the code
• Extensibility and maintainability of the code
• Integration with multiple programming languages
• Performance and scalability of the code

The winner will be announced on September 30, 2013. The winning entry will be provided under both Apache 2.0 and GPL dual-licenses for maximum compatibility with both open-source projects and commercial ones. For more information about the open-source "OpenFlow Driver" competition and submission guidelines, please visit www.opennetworking.org/competition. Competition terms and rules can be found at: www.opennetworking.org/images/stories/downloads/misc/openflow-driver-competition-terms-conditions.pdf.

About ONF

Launched in 2011 by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon (News - Alert), and Yahoo!, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a growing nonprofit organization with more than 90 members whose mission is to advance the commercialization and use of SDN and the OpenFlow protocol. ONF will accelerate the delivery and use of SDN and OpenFlow technologies and standards while fostering a vibrant market of products, services, applications, customers, and users. For further details visit the ONF website at: http://www.opennetworking.org.

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