Read this http://kerneltrap.org/node/5382 especially part with title "The politics of vulnerabilities:" and you will get idea how much is Cisco "nice".
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Christiano F. Haesbaert <haesba...@haesbaert.org> wrote: > 2010/3/11 TS Lura <tsl...@gmail.com>: >> Dear OpenBSD community, >> >> I'm doing a small research paper on Cisco and try to find out if they are >> "evil" or not in relative to open/free source/standards, and business >> practice. Eg. locking people to their product line aka the MS way. >> >> I'm sending this mail to you guys because I think many of you know allot >> about networking, and the networking industry. I'm hoping that someone > would >> be kind and share some of their impressions of Cisco with me. >> >> My hypothesis is that Cisco is following the best business practice in >> relation to proprietary and open/free source. >> To answer this hypothesis I'm trying to find out if Cisco is using their >> proprietary solution when there is a better open/free B alternative. >> >> My preliminary thoughts is taken from what I have perceived, that Cisco >> makes a proprietary solution to give them a edge and uniqueness in the >> marked which they can harvest capital from. And when that solution has >> become commonplace they switch over to non-proprietary solutions to become >> more interoperable and thus stay competitive. >> >> First, Is this reasonable observation? >> Second, Are there any deviations from this trend? If so, why? >> >> >> I'm very grateful for any reply I get. > > I had bad experiences with cisco being "nice", we had to implement > udld in our equipments, which cisco wrote and made a standard, but > it seems they wrote it in a way that no one can implement, read: > they simply won't explain the machine states protocol. > > http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc5171.html > > It's simply insane, they write stuff so that no one can understand and/or > implement. > > That was my closest experience with cisco niceness and I consider it > enough to build up my hate. > > -- http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html
