re: Cisco Follows IBM Infamy Of Oppression, Bruce Kesler

Uneducated, one-sided and sensationalistic. The capabilities described are not Cisco-specific, and could be created by a team of smart engineers using entirely open-source tools. Given China's heavy adoption of open-source, the same picture could have been painted with the open source community as El Diablo, instead of Cisco.

Come on Mark -- I don't expect you to propogate and reinforce pieces like that.

Cheers,
 

Given China's heavy adoption of open-source, the same picture could have been painted with the open source community as El Diablo, instead of Cisco.

If Cisco was giving away fully functional products to all comers, yes, that analogy would be reasonable.*

[* Not specious. See Sun's OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, etc)
 

Hi J.J. and Dan,

Given my computer knowledge is such that I only bothered to learn how to do a .jpg yesterday, I'll have to let you and Dan argue over the reasonability of the open-source analogy. If Stu or Jacob H. or Dr. Von are reading this, maybe you can jump in on that question.

On the matter of Bruce Kesler, yes he has a strong point of view on this topic - I post links to provocatively argued pieces purposefully. Bruce, aside from being a guy whom I know from experience does his homework, is making a moral argument here; perhaps somebody else could have done it ( I don't know) but CISCO *chose* to do so. It wasn't an act of providence nor of altruism so I think Bruce is correct to raise uncomfortable questons even if you think the IBM analogy itself is extreme or unfair to CISCO. The underlying question of " Was this the right thing to do ?" remains valid.