Cisco open IOS announcement dismissed as vaporware by Vyatta's Dave Roberts

By Brad Reese on Thu, 12/13/07 - 9:17am.

The announcement that Cisco will open up IOS was dismissed as mere vaporware by Dave Roberts - vice president of open source networking vendor - Vyatta in his blog - Open Source Juicer yesterday.

Was the Cisco open IOS announcement just a knee-jerk reaction to the Juniper opens up to third-party development announcement two days earlier?

Dave states in his blog:

"Not wanting to seem like shrew, Cisco today announced that it too will open up IOS, somehow, someday..."

"Cisco basically just did an internal reorganization of itself and is handwaving at some future openness, trying to rain on Juniper's parade."

"The fact is, Cisco has nothing other than an intent to do something, someday."

With that out of the way, Juniper proceeds to catch Dave's ire:

"Essentially, if you're a big company, and Juniper decides that you're worthy, Juniper will give you the privilege of signing an NDA and paying it a yearly fee in order to develop applications that will run on the control plane processor or line cards of its router."

"Basically, Juniper's program as an invitation-only affair, like a snobby country-club that would never be so crass as to allow the riff-raff into the building."

"If you're interested in developing to Juniper's PSDP (aside: am I the only person who says 'piss-dip' there?), you can apply, but Juniper has to feel that you're 'worthy' enough to be accepted."

"Once they decide that you're good enough, you get the privilege of signing a bunch of legal paperwork and paying them a hefty fee."

"After all that, you can write programs in the JunOS-variant of FreeBSD and for their forwarding engine processors."

Read the rest of Dave's blog

Is Cisco's announcement vaporware?

Is the Juniper program really just a snobby country-club?

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