Standards for Open Source Development

Abstract

Welcome to this edition of IEEE Communications Standards Magazine. This edition is the result of the work of many people committed to the creation and development of a magazine that focuses on standards relevant to the information and communication technology (ICT) industry. Over the past decade, there has been an interesting evolution in the standardization of telecommunications. While the traditional standardization development bodies have struggled to retain relevance, there has been a plethora of new organizations created for new standardization topics. Perhaps the initial driver for this devolution was the end of the PTT monopoly era that started in the U.S. telecom market in the 1980s. With more telephone companies and less government involvement, there was a need for standards development organizations without government influence. This resulted initially in the creation of several industry only standards bodies, but it would soon evolve into the creation of a new body for almost every new topic to be standardised. A more recent reason for the ongoing shift is the increased ability of computer hardware, especially those that are in large data centers (which is generally referred to as the cloud). This has resulted in a shift from communications between hardware boxes to communications between software instances in the cloud. Many refer to this shift as “softwarization.” Traditionally, communications hardware standards have been developed in different standardization development bodies than software standards. Standards for telecommunications between boxes has been traditionally viewed as different, perhaps with more structure and longevity, than standards for communication between software programs. If it is all software, the tendency is for new work in telecommunications standardization to gravitate toward software-focused standardization development bodies. A separate trend in software is toward a decentralized and collaborative software development model that has become commonly referred to as the open source development model. The desire to leverage these platforms for development has resulted in new standardization players in telecommunications standards being open source forums (e.g., the Linux Foundation). In recognition of this shift, and in some cases to reduce the attrition, most traditional standards bodies have been looking into adding some form of open source development. For example, IEEESA has led its open source initiative through the Corporate Advisory Group (CAG) since 2015 and has been running a trial for several years. The procedures are currently under development to allow the creation of an open source standards project. In ITU-T, Resolution 90 was approved at WTSA 2016 indicating that the Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG) would work on a benefits analysis for the implementation of open-source projects in ITU-T. At the 34th Plenary of ISO/IEC JTC 1 in 2018, an advisory group (AG3) was created on Open Source Software (OSS). The group is expected to continue for multiple six-month terms to explore and recommend the best OSS strategy for JTC 1. It will be interesting to see how the evolution in the standardization of telecommunications continues in the next decade. The importance of standards to the work and careers of ICT practitioners continues to motivate the content of this publication. This magazine strives to provide summaries of new innovative standardization activities to spark creativity and enthusiasm. While proposals for standards feature topics are always welcome, we will focus IEEE Communications Standards Magazine on a recurring series of nine relevant standards topics. The technical editors for these series (https://www.comsoc. org/comstandardsmag/series-editors) seek out relevant articles on standardization in their areas, and several of these series will publish multiple times during the year. In this issue, three of these series are featured. You will enjoy an editorial from each team of series editors as well as a summary of the articles in this issue. Readers will notice a recurring commentary from the IEEE-SA President. In addition, this issue features commentaries with stanStandards for Open Source Development