While innovative, leading edge open source efforts are happening more and more often. Cleaning up after such forward progress is often forgotten. Consolidation and interoperability of the SDN controller and data plane domains remain an elusive target. There is way too much non-differentiated value in the ecosystem and not enough developers to warrant the diversity. As the open source initiatives associated with SDN controller and data plane become increasingly abundant we would like to take this opportunity to discuss the benefits of both diversity and consolidation in this domain. The recent emergence of the ODL controller with an FD.io forwarding plane to address carrier needs provides a new compelling option.
