Neela Jacques's blog

Do you want free software or do you want supported, enterprise grade software? Many people think that’s the question. It’s not.

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Steve Wexler raised an interesting question last week: Is SDN revolutionary or evolutionary?

How can you predict if an open source project is going to be successful? This is a question I’ve thought a lot about. I’ll be honest I’ve made the mistake of underestimating the potential of an open source project a few times in my career. I certainly remember a number of conversations while at VMware when the group all came to the conclusion that OpenStack would never get any traction. How silly do I feel now? But that begs the question: how could I have known? Is it all a crapshoot or are there signs you can point to?

It’s been a busy couple weeks and I wanted to share some of the highlights. I had the pleasure of being a judge for an SDN Hackathon sponsored by Deutsche Telekom (DT) and Lightspeed Ventures where developers came together to learn about OpenDaylight and build functional and deployable ‘bite-sized’ SDN applications in only six hours.

I’ve been in my new role for a couple weeks now and have been struck by something I’ve discovered: the vibrancy of the OpenDaylight developer community. I have spent the last week starting to engage with a number of the developers on the project and every single one has shared a passion for the project that I didn’t quite expect. OpenDaylight has brought together a community of people who share one vision--to change networking. Not to serve vendor interests. The results speak for themselves. In open source, code rules.

Today I’m honored to join the world’s largest open source SDN and NFV project as executive director. I wanted to share with the community why I’ve chosen to focus all my time on this project.