About OpenSAF

About OpenSAF

OpenSAF is an open source community with projects focused on high availability middleware. The goal of OpenSAF projects is to develop HA middleware that is consistent with the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) specifications). OpenSAF is freely available to anyone under the LGPLv2.1 and anyone may contribute to the code base. The OpenSAF Foundation is a not-for-profit organization established by leading communications and computing companies to facilitate the work of the OpenSAF project and to accelerate the adoption of OpenSAF in commercial products.

The mission of OpenSAF is to:

• Expand the open source implementation of high availability middleware
• Align with SA Forum specifications
• Enhance OpenSAF for easier manageability and usability
• Publicize and accelerate the adoption of OpenSAF
• Focus on the communications market and extend to other industries
• Establish OpenSAF as a de facto standard for application developers and ISVs

The OpenSAF Project and Community

The guiding principle of the OpenSAF community is that the code be freely available and open to all. The OpenSAF code is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 (LGPL v2.1), a recognized and widely used open source license. Anyone can participate in the OpenSAF projects by downloading the code or contributing to the projects.

The development community drives the evolution and roadmap of OpenSAF. The OpenSAF project is led by the Technical Leadership Council (TLC) whose functions are to facilitate the architectural discussions in the community, plan upcoming releases based on developer commitments, appoint maintainers, ensure that all major contributions are implemented consistent with OpenSAF architecture and determine when the code is ready for general release. No commercial entity may have more than one vote on the TLC at a time, thus ensuring that no one organization can exercise control over the project. Anyone may be invited to join the TLC by demonstrating their commitment to the OpenSAF projects and becoming a recognized leader in the OpenSAF community.

The OpenSAF roadmap

Coming soon.

The OpenSAF release process

The OpenSAF TLC is responsible for planning and managing the OpenSAF maintenance and enhancement releases.
Here are some terminologies associated with an OpenSAF release:
FC - Functionality Complete
RCn - ReleaseCandidate 1...n
GA - General Availability

The OpenSAF TLC strives to make two enhancements releases a year. Any number of maintenance releases can be made in a calendar year based on the number and importances of the fixes. A maintenance release can be made available at the same time as an enhancements release.
The timeline between FC and GA is generally about 3 to 4 weeks.