Cisco open IOS

This caught my eye: "Cisco opening up IOS"

I was cleaning out some old stuff, and the headline was on an almost-discarded scrap of paper. The story had also caught my attention back in 2007, when I printed it out, but I had since forgot all about it.

And so, it seems, has the internet.

"Cisco plans to "componentize" IOS - developing only one implementation of a specific function instead of several, depending on the image - dynamically link IOS services and move the software onto a Unix-based kernel. Cisco then plans to open up interfaces on IOS to allow third-party and customer-developed applications to access IOS services."

It never happened

There is not a lot of information to go on, but it is clear from the story that it was an important strategy for Cisco, it had support from management, and they had now gone to the press. But for some reason we never got open IOS.

Naturally I searched for more information, and came away empty-handed. I then searched again, this time very thoroughly, and all I could find was the information that is also in the scrap of paper. To find that information, you pretty much need to know it already.

That made the story more intriguing to me. What happened? Why no updates on this? Why did all information seemingly fall into a black hole? I have no idea.

It is difficult to imagine the impact an open IOS would have had. A componentized and to some extent open sourced IOS, would have been like a stepless multivariate lego brick. In a world where it had materialized around 2010, what would networking have looked like now? What would home networks have looked like now? What would the company Cisco have looked like now? What would the competitors have looked like now?...

Guessing what motivation Cisco had for the open IOS project, I think there might have been two main ones. The first would have been to improve conditions for internal developers. The second would have been to gain a stronger position in virtual data centers. The whole thing might have failed because it is much harder than it sounds. Maybe some of the abandoned work was later used in the Linux based IOS XE. I dont know.

There is no nice conclusion to this article. I just wanted to share this small mystery with you.