What are the advantages of open source from a competitive standpoint?
Herrell: We pull from various parts of the open source world, and contribute back, of course. Everything from Linux, and XORP [eXtensible Open Routing Platform — the open source routing software on which OFR is based]. The advantage here is we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. Many of the components have been weather tested in many other environments. So we’re not coming in at the fundamental ground level where it’s a systems theory. So we hit the ground running. And then from our perspective, our job as a solutions provider is to continue to make quick incremental improvements to the solution just to continually advance the state of the solution that we offer. How come XORP, and open source routing in general, has not taken off as widely as open source computing or application platforms, such as Linux or Apache? Roberts: We’re fond of saying that networking started out open source. The first networking stacks were open source stacks with either BSD, or people would run [network
