The Linux Foundation (LF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have joined hands to create open source software that accelerates United States government technology research and development innovation.

Under the collaboration agreement, DARPA and the LF will create a broad collaboration umbrella (US Government Open Programmable Secure (US GOV OPS) that allows United States Government projects, their ecosystem, and open community to participate in accelerating innovation and security in the areas of 5G, Edge, AI, Standards, Programmability, and IoT among other technologies.

The project formation encourages ecosystem players to support US Government initiatives to create the latest in technology software.

The project will launch as a standard open source project with neutral governance and a charter similar to other projects within the Linux Foundation.

Additionally, the agreement enables collaboration with upstream and downstream communities such as LF Networking, LF Edge, and Zephyr, among others, to build on a secure code base for use by the US Government.

The new US GOV OPS umbrella will include the Open Programmable Secure- 5G (OPS-5G) program as its first project, currently in formation with the help of DARPA, the US Navy and additional performers.

The goal of OPS-5G is to create open source software and systems enabling secure end to end 5G and follow-on mobile networks. OPS-5G will create capabilities to address feature velocity in open source software, mitigating large scale Botnet of Things (BoT), network slicing on suspect gear, and adaptive adversaries operating at scale.

DARPA’s Dr. Jonathan Smith will be presenting at the upcoming Open Networking and Edge Executive Forum (ONEEF) taking place March 10-12.