Linux Foundation pushes Open RAN beyond interfaces with OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation
In sum, what to know:
-The OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation is working toward a framework for fully open-source RAN, and its first technical release is already out.
-The project was first announced at Mobile World Congress 2026 and has backing from the U.S. FutureG office as well as members including the likes of AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and carriers AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile US.
The next stage of Open RAN isn’t about opening interfaces between network components, it is about fully open-source RAN—and a newly formed Linux Foundation group backed by major operators, chipmakers, NEMs and the U.S. government is working for achieve a viable commercial ecosystem around that concept.
The Open CU/DU or OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation was launched at this year’s MWC, with backing from the U.S. Department of War’s FutureG office in the form of three years of funding. The goal is to build an open-source CU/DU software stack for 5G and future 6G RAN that breaks vendor lock-in and accelerates multi-vendor deployments, while keeping the supply chain domestic; those aims have been of interest to both the global carrier ecosystem and the U.S. government.
Arpit Joshipura, SVP and GM of networking, edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, laid out the comparative concept in an interview with RCR Wireless News: Linux itself is a “Linux of servers,” but the technology’s foundations have also moved beyond servers, he said. “The Linux of cloud is Kubernetes. And guess what? The Linux of RAN is going to be OCUDU.”
Joshipura added: “With Project OCUDU and the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation, we’re resolving the last of the bottlenecks of proprietary software in the CU-DU, and opening it up for open source.”
OCUDU members span R&D, chips, NEMs and MNOs
OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation launched with nearly 50 members and has been steadily adding to that number in the months since, perhaps most notably with the addition of Qualcomm in May. Telecom operator members include U.S. carriers AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile US.
OCUDU’s governing board has been established since MWC, as well as its Technical Steering Committee (TSC) that provides an avenue for weekly discussions on features and roadmaps, and which worked on the first release. In terms of that first technical release, Joshipura said that OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation was fortunate in that it didn’t have to start from scratch; the seed code came from OCUDU project members SRS and DeepSig.
While some of the requirements for OCUDU come from the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research & Engineering, the group is also working with requirements from ATIS, AI-RAN Alliance and Open RAN Alliance, according to Joshipura. Integration work will be done through a Linux Foundation sister project, he added, and “All the vendors and service providers will contribute, commercialize, and then research will be used, and accelerate this.” While the U.S. government has jump-started the project, Joshipura pointed out, the collaborators on OCUDU are global.
In the second half of this year, Linux Foundation is planning a series of webinars for developer education and training to widen contributors to the OCUDU ecosystem; a second software release is also planned. Ultimately, OCUDU sounds very much like work to deliver on a more comprehensive realization of the flexibility that Open RAN has been promising.
“We announced OCUDU as a major innovation step to getting to open source RAN—not just open interfaces, but open-source RAN, which gives you the full flexibility of innovations, add-on use cases, security, faster path to deploy, all of that good stuff that open source brings with it,” said Joshipura. “We will still have interoperability with a whole bunch of radios across the industry and a whole set of other elements outside the RAN.”
In the longer term, the OCUDU ecosystem is also intended to support experimentation ahead of formal 6G standardization. “What this platform gives you is, it gives the developers the ability to pre-test, pre-code and set 6G in code as standards and check it out,” Joshipura said, adding: “Effectively, we want a global set of implementation(s) where code is the default standard, but at the same time, we have alignment so that we’re not fragmenting the market.”
Watch the full interview with Arpit Joshipura below:
