Open source platforms are becoming more and more fundamental to the new telecoms network architecture, raising exciting prospects for a more democratic ecosystem and rapid innovation. But open source also comes with the risk of fragmentation, which has already been seen in industry splits over different approaches to management and orchestration (MANO) in virtualized networks. A large number of open projects has emerged in the areas of virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), MANO and even telecoms hardware initiatives like Facebook’s OpenCellular. Many of the most prominent are hosted by the Linux Foundation, and that increasingly powerful force in the telecoms landscape has announced that it will be combining six major projects under a common “horizontal umbrella” called the LF Network Fund…