Over two dozen OSDL member companies from all over the globe are actively involved with the CGL initiative (Figure 3). Member companies cover the whole ecosystem: Carriers, network equipment providers (NEPs), telecom equipment manufactures (TEMs), platform providers, independent software vendors (ISVs), middleware providers and Linux distributors. OSDL member companies gather their market requirements from their customers as input and outputs two deliverables:

• The requirement document--the current version of the CGL requirement document is 3.1.
• Initiatives and Capabilities, materialized by open source projects to enable and provide implementations to the CGL requirements.

In some cases, an open source project already exists and matches a defined requirement, so member companies can contribute to that specific project and help advance the implementation. In other cases, either new projects are started or member companies release their proprietary Linux technology to Open Source to satisfy the specified requirements.

The open source community in this model is both the judge and the beneficiary of what is accepted into the kernel and what becomes mainstream.

At the receiving end are Linux distributions vendors who utilize the requirements document to produce CGL distributions that are then registered with OSDL for the specific version of the CGL requirement document. Currently, five Linux distributors provide CGL 2.0 registered distributions:

• MontaVista
• Novell/SUSE
• FSMLabs
• TimeSys
• Wind River

Platform providers also use CGL registered distributions on their platforms. Those platforms end up being offered to NEPs and Carriers and are deployed on carrier networks.

Next: Overview of CGL Requirements Definition version 3.1 »