I'm sorry. My intent was not to be inflammatory.
My experience with Cisco as a company is limited, so I'm therefor trying to find out more. In that process I maybe asking a controversial question. Which for some is quite obvious. Thanks for the replies so far. .tsl On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Pete Vickers <p...@systemnet.no> wrote: > > 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
