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XORP 1.0 Released
Mark Handley writes "XORP is the eXtensible Open Router
Platform - an open-source router software stack for FreeBSD and Linux.
It's designed from scratch to be extensible, so you can write your own
router applications that play nicely with the existing routing
protocols. We just released XORP 1.0! There's also a Live CD if you want to try
it out without reinstalling your machine. More details in this CNET article."
The problem, IMHO, is that ALL high end routers use HARDWARE routing (see: flow/fast switching in 7500/12000s) instead of software routing. Unless you 're building ASICs to handle stuff in the data plane (VIPs or whatever the 12ks use for dCEF and the like), you're not really in any danger of becoming used by the higher end routing equipment manufacturers.
:( Hopefully, this is something that will come along in the next version (maybe?).)
Also, software can be written all day long to run on a general purpose PC - but when was the last time you saw a multimode ATM DS3 interface, or a multichannel T3 interface for a PC?
Finally, I'm not convinced that opening the router software market is a 'good thing' - Linux advocates continually talk about 'software monoculture' being a bad, bad thing, as evidenced by Microsoft, yet you speak in your last paragraph of wanting precisely this. Imagine a flaw in the way you handled PIM (a la Cisco about a year ago), which would effectively DoS the router. Cisco at least notified their large carriers before specific details leaked onto the net - I shudder to think of someone posting 0day exploit code for something like this on Full-Disclosure.
(incidentally, I find the project fairly interesting, with the noted lack of redistribution ability.