“The open source banter seems to be pestering me. I see several
sides to the argument, all valid from the perspectives of the
arguers. I refuse to get in the middle of it. Instead, I found an
interesting pro-open source argument in the form of a product.”
“This past week, I was in Las Vegas for NetWorld + Interop.
Although this isn’t really a Linux show, it plays in the arena I’ve
been running for several years: internetworking. Linux as an NOC
host technology is now legendary. But unfortunately, lack of
commercialization doesn’t fit the N+I model right now.”
“Nonetheless, Linux keeps popping up on the show floor. The most
interesting Linux application came in the form of a router from
Xylan/NBase. It’s an open source model. The idea is to add value to
the platform (admittedly a proprietary bus) which uses the Linux
2.2 kernel as a multi-CPU packet-forwarding engine. The frame/bus
is proprietary on the inside, but much of the software guts
consists of plain vanilla 2.2.”