I was just reading the April's issue of the Communications of the ACM (the flagship magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery), and noticed that OpenBSD and its developers were mentioned in one article, in a rather negative way:
"Unfortunately, there is a segment of the open source community that is incapable of playing well with others, when those others don't play the way they want them to. For those who have not had to deal with these people, it's a bit like talking to a four-year-old. When you explain checkers to your niece, she might decide that she doesn't like your rules and follows her own rules. You humor her, she's being creative, and this is amusing in a four-year-old. If you were playing chess with a colleague who suddenly told you that the king could move one, two, or three places in one go, you would be pissed off, because this person would obviously be screwing with you, or insane. Have I lost my mind?! What does this have to do with VRRP or network protocols? The OpenBSD team, led as always by their Glorious Leader (their words, not mine), decided that a RAND license just wasn't free enough for them. They wrote their own protocol, which was completely incompatible with VRRP. Well, you say, that's not so bad; that's competition, and we all know that competition is good and brings better products, and it's the glorious triumph of Capitalism. But there is one last little nit to this story. The new protocol dubbed CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) uses the exact same IP number as VRRP (112). Most people, and KV includes himself in this group, think this was a jerk move. "Why would they do this?" I hear you cry. Well, it turns out that they believe themselves to be in a war with the enemies of open source, as well as with those opposed to motherhood and apple pie. Stomping on the same protocol number was, in their minds, a strike against their enemies and all for the good. Of course, it makes operating devices with both protocols in the same network difficult, and it makes debugging the software that implements the protocol nearly impossible." Here is the link to the article: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/4/147357-the-network-protocol-battle/abstr act If you are not a member of the ACM, you can read it in ACM Queue, in which it was published in January: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2090149 I somehow feel this is a very distorted view of what really happened. Perhaps it would be good if somebody "official" wrote a Letter to the Editor (Communications of the ACM publish them in every issue)? Wil.
