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BusinessWeek On XORP vs. Cisco
cornfed writes "BusinessWeek is running this article talking about how XORP will take on Cisco's dominance in the router market. The article speculates that XORP could represent the next 'open-source rebellion.' One can only imagine the fallout within the telecommunications industry if an open-source project like this gained traction-- Cisco would not be the only giant to be slain."
Here is more about XORP (the Extensible Open Router Platform), for those that don't know.
see xorp's website
It's BSD Licensed, so Yes, MS could take and use it, much like their TCP/IP stack.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
Like $1000 for a Cisco branch office router vs. $1000 for a PC with enough memory and processing power and networking cards to run XORP and match the router functionality?
Or perhaps under $30 per port for a fixed Ethernet layer 3 switch at 100Mb?
If you think these machines are "needlessly high cost" then I'm not sure you quite understand network requirements. I'm not saying there aren't places where XORP will be successful, but there are places it can't get to in the forseeable future (at least 3 technology generations). The core of any enterprise network is MUCH more complicated than a single switch and employs much more reliability than can be provided by a PC. Companies still buy IBM mainframes for a reason, and that high end in the routing space will be routers from Cisco, Juniper and similar devices for the forseeable future.
The SMB market? Bring on XORP, they'll be playing with it by the end of the decade.