The Linux Foundation and the operator-driven Next Generation Mobile Network (NGMN) alliance are joining forces to collaborate on 5G, including the “end-to-end 5G architecture and beyond 5G”. The two bodies managed to tick just about every 5G buzzword in their joint statement, saying that “specific areas of alignment may include sustainability, network automation and network autonomy based on AI, security, edge cloud, virtualization, disaggregation, cloud-native and service-based architecture, to name a few”. They even pointed to future cooperation around 6G. NGMN’s main function is to collect and distil operators’ requirements and priorities and translate these into something readily understandable by vendors, in order to guide their development priorities. In this case, it is likely to be tapping into the Linux…