50 Shades of Open Source: How to Determine What’s Suitable for Enterprise White Box Networking
To date, the open source community has been quite successful in terms of coming up with scalable and reliable implementations for enterprise servers, databases and more. Yet many enterprises remain skittish about implementing open source software, probably no more so than in the networking space.
Part of the reason is that there are so many different implementations of open source software, many of them backed by different entities with different agendas. Having many minds contribute to an open source project can be a good thing – until it comes time to make a decision about something and stick with it, so you can get a working product out the door. Enterprises need practical implementations that they can count on day in and day out to get a job done.
Defining the shades of open source
Open source essentially comes in different shades that are not all created equal. Understanding them will help you determine whether the open source implementation you have in mind has the kind of reliability and stability you need in any enterprise IT tool or application.
At a base level is the “pure” open source community, where like-minded people contribute their time and knowledge to a project. Continue reading