Open Sauce Software
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Thursday 13 December 2007, 4:58 PM
Open source routers? Don't hold your breath
Hey, I just heard that Cisco's routers are going open source! That's exciting, isn't it! No it's not, because it's not true.
The words "open" and "router" created a small flurry this week, as Juniper "opened up" its routers, and Cisco seemed to make a counter-promise to open its routers too. But don't be fooled. Router software is definitely one of the most obvious targets for open source - but it is hard to see many signs of progress.
Routers really could benefit from open source. At the moment, users are paying their network vendors to re-invent the wheel, duplicating the same router software functions on different families of hardware, just because those router vendors want to keep control, and keep their margins high.
Software costs could be slashed, new features could be added more easily, and new hardware brought on-stream in an open source world. In web servers, open source can lead the world, why not in routers?
Routers are tightly bundled with their operating software, but they are all programmed with more or less the same style of command line interface, copied from Cisco's IOS. The vendors' OS code itself is rigorously protected - no-one knows how much money Cisco got from Huawei, for instance, when the Chinese network vendor admitted copying IOS code.
This week's announcements had nothing to do with open source. Juniper is allowing third parties to develop applications for its JUNOS operating system, but only those third parties that it approves of. That's a long way from open source. It's approaching the level of open-ness we've always had with DOS and Windows.
And Cisco's promise is less than that - it's simply vapour, designed to make the company look good while its analyst event is on.
Open source software could cut the cost of routers in half, says Vyatta Networks, the best-known open source router company. It could bring benefits to Cisco and Juniper in the form of better applications,
Vyatta uses the eXtensible Open source Routing Platform XORP, which has been plugging away for five years now, on general purpose Intel hardware. And why not? We think of routers as needing special purpose hardware, but remember, they all trace their lineage back to general purpose hardware, as early models ran on 1980s workhorses, like the DEC PDP 11.
Vyatta is encouraging its users to post "Dear John" letters to Cisco's John Chambers, explaining why they dumped his kit. It's also set up a two-tier distribution similar to Red Hat, but unless we're missing it, we haven't seen the explosion of open source routing that Vyatta hoped for.
It's possible, of course, that these competing "open" announcements from Juniper and Cisco might be the start of something. They could be a sign that the big guys are starting to feel the competition but, as we saw five years ago with Microsoft's shared source, there's a mighty long way to go between a company acknowledging the potential of opening up, and actually doing anything real about it.
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