On 11. mars 2010, at 12.13, TS Lura wrote: > 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. > > > Kind regards, > > TSLura. >
Hi, Lots of flame-bait in there, which at least I am happily ignoring. Couple of interesting points though: 1. Time to market, it's normally 'do it yourself' in private first, then open source later. E.g. Cisco did ISL first until 802.1Q was later established as the standard, and adopted by them. 2. Throughbred solutions, e.g. some (most?) products are a mix match of proprietary & open source, e.g. see this link for open source software incorporated into a particular Cisco product: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/fwsm/fwsm40/license/fwsmoslic.html /Pete
