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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."
Because XORP is more fun to say.
The result of XORP & similar technology will be a decentralization of networks. If you look at a typical enterprise network, the backbone of that network will be a single "enterprise" (ie. expensive) Layer-3 switch from a company like Extreme, Foundry, Cisco or whatever.
Those switches are cost-effective because of the needlessly high cost of low-end equipment.
If supported, flexible & cheap routing becomes a reality, you'll see clouds of cheap-commodity level hardware replace big networking iron... just as Linux displaced Solaris, HP-UX and AIX.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Cisco is the only company with an employment policy that is worse than the one at Intel. Cisco does quarterly performance reviews; they are strictly by the bell (i.e. gaussian) curve. The bottom 10% are automatically fired without a second chance.
Worse, Cisco has also demanded that it be allowed to hire foreign engineers from India and China. According to Cisco management, it absolutely needs H-1B engineers in order to be competitive and has continued to hire H-1B engineers, never minding that 80,000 Americans were unemployed in Silicon Valley during the 2001-2003 recession.