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Sandvine CEO Says Internet Monitoring a Necessity
Khalid Baheyeldin writes in with a CBC interview with the CEO of Sandvine, Dave Caputo (bio here). Sandvine is the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that provides the technology that Comcast and other ISPs use to overrule Net neutrality by, for example, injecting RST packets to disrupt Bittorrent traffic. Caputo says, among other things, that Internet monitoring is a necessity. Some of the comments to the interview are more tech-savvy than the interviewee comes across.
Sandvine is one of many telecomm gear companies that strongly support OSS. I used to work at a similar company with at least one ex-Sandvine co-worker. Basically, they build "devices" which they sell to ISPs and other big network operators. They build those devices with custom or off the shelf hardware combined with on OSS operating system, toolchain, and applications, plus a few closed source applications that contain their core competency and money proposition. This is often referred to as the "secret sauce" code.
These companies do support OSS and build their entire business model around it (in combination with some closed source). They aren't OSS zealots, but most of the employees are strong supporters of OSS and the companies are very good about contributing code back. A lot of the code in Linux and the BSDs is contributed by these companies. They support OSS conferences and the like, because they want to promote OSS, because it is a good way to recruit new talent, and because the improvements that come out of those conferences are often beneficial to their bottom line. A lot of people think OSS is created by hobbyists, but really Sandvine is a good example of who really makes up the OSS community and contributes code. It is mostly businesses who use it to make money in conjunction with hardware, services, or additional closed source software.