Linux Foundation Europe has announced the launch of the Sylva Directed Fund, a dedicated funding initiative providing resources and support for Project Sylva. The fund has received first-round subscriptions from industry leaders, including carriers Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, and Vodafone; vendors Ericsson, Nokia and 6WIND; IT leaders SUSE and Red Hat; and digital infrastructure leader Equinix.

These subscriptions are aimed at providing vital resources to support Sylva’s mission of building an open source, production-grade Telco Cloud Stack that meets EU privacy, security and energy efficiency requirements with applicability to other regions as well.

“The Sylva Directed Fund marks a significant milestone in the development of an open source Telco Cloud Stack,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT at the Linux Foundation. “We are thrilled to see leading European carriers and vendors further commit to supporting Project Sylva’s mission. Additional resources, combined with industry expertise and collaboration, will help accelerate innovation and reduce complexity and fragmentation within the European telecommunication and edge services landscape and beyond.”

Building upon other existing open source projects across networking and cloud – including LF Networking‘s Anuket and CNCF’s Kubernetes and Cluster API – Sylva provides implementations and extensions needed to address challenges associated with telco and edge use cases within the EU and globally. The new Sylva Directed Fund will provide the resources and support for Project Sylva to achieve its mission, across three key areas of focus:

• Support the development team that is building the Sylva Telco Cloud Framework by procuring any necessary licenses / resources / CI capabilities to accelerate the development of the stack.
• Support the Validation Program and its Validation Centers by procuring any hardware/services needed for the deployments of the Sylva Validation Platforms composing the Sylva Validation Center.
• Support the overall adoption of Sylva and market awareness by procuring marketing and communication capabilities and enabling the Sylva community to participate in top events and conferences.