2010/3/11 TS Lura <[email protected]>: > Dear OpenBSD community, > > I'm doing a small research paper on Cisco and try to find out if they are > "evil" or not in relative to open/free source/standards, and business > practice. Eg. locking people to their product line aka the MS way. > > I'm sending this mail to you guys because I think many of you know allot > about networking, and the networking industry. I'm hoping that someone would > be kind and share some of their impressions of Cisco with me. > > My hypothesis is that Cisco is following the best business practice in > relation to proprietary and open/free source. > To answer this hypothesis I'm trying to find out if Cisco is using their > proprietary solution when there is a better open/free alternative. > > My preliminary thoughts is taken from what I have perceived, that Cisco > makes a proprietary solution to give them a edge and uniqueness in the > marked which they can harvest capital from. And when that solution has > become commonplace they switch over to non-proprietary solutions to become > more interoperable and thus stay competitive. > > First, Is this reasonable observation? > Second, Are there any deviations from this trend? If so, why? > > > I'm very grateful for any reply I get.
I had bad experiences with cisco being "nice", we had to implement udld in our equipments, which cisco wrote and made a standard, but it seems they wrote it in a way that no one can implement, read: they simply won't explain the machine states protocol. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc5171.html It's simply insane, they write stuff so that no one can understand and/or implement. That was my closest experience with cisco niceness and I consider it enough to build up my hate.
