From Erlang Community

Everytime I talk to people about Erlang they think it's just another language.

Erlang is not just a language.

Erlang is based off of Joe Armstrong's thesis - "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors". The current download contains:

• the src code with targets for WIN32, linux and vxworks
• pre-compiled binaries for win32 and linux
• system libraries with built-in

  ** easily distributable, configurable ( in-memory or disk ) database system called Mnesia
  ** native bindings to mysql and postgres
  ** SNMP V1, V2 and V3 agents, 
  ** a database config that exposes tables as SNMP tables
  ** 3rd party contrib libs for - web server, jabber, ldap, radius, ldap, nfs

• bindings to C, C++, Java, Tk
• good documentation including how to extend it with examples
• a couple of books that discuss erlang implementations of non-trivial distributing computing objects.

Ericsson open sourced it's software switching infrastructure, somewhat like AT&T Bell Labs open sourcing Plan9. It's different because Ericsson actually produced real products using Erlang. Ericsson openly endorses Erlang - OTP systems:[1] What other open source language do you know that is used by a corporation to build the AXE 301, a 512K cross connect switch that achieve throughputs of 160Gbs. [2]