RE: OT - Cisco plans to restrict using IOS for dynamips!

Tom,

First I want to say that I have bet my entire career on Cisco and I enjoy
Cisco as a company and I loved working for them in the past and maybe one
day in the future I will work for them again. (I want to first say this as
some of my following remarks are going to sound negative and I want it to be
understood that it is only in regards specifically to this thread.)

I have to agree with Iwan here and your tone and insults towards Iwan either
show you haven't been in the computer industry very long or you don't see or
don't agree with the big picture that many are arguing towards in this
thread.

Do I think it is right for people to infringe on License agreements, no I do
not. If I have products in a production environment and I want to get
support for it I feel it is very important to have valid licenses and people
deserve to be paid for the hard work they put into development and support
of a product.

What Cisco has failed to do is create a good developer test bed environment
for test engineers and people that are interested in propagating their
products. It was already mentioned a while ago in this thread how harmful
failing to do these things was for Novell in the past. How many people on
this list still use Novell in their environment? For many years Novell
still had better products than Microsoft but no one saw the need or lost
interest due to many factors.

Microsoft for example has the MSDN subscription that you can purchase as a
developer and allows you to use as much of their products as you want in a
lab environment without license infringement. I personally have an MSDN
license for this reason. I own licenses for all my production equipment but
whatever I am messing around with or testing, which is a lot, I use my MSDN
subscription for. It isn't exactly free by any means but is realistic for
Microsoft to charge for and allows me to legitimately use their products.
And it allows me to continue to learn new information about their products
and retain interest in continuing to use their product.

Cisco has failed to initiate a similar program. There is nothing in place
that allows people to legally use their software in a similar fashion. Yes
you can use much of it for 90 days with a trial license but how many people
on this list have finished a CCIE in 90 days? I know I have passed my SP
and Security with studying for less than 30 days for each but that is not
the norm. (Studying for 30 days does not mean I was first introduced to the
technologies and learned it all in 30 days, that is just the time I spent
studying for the test specifically.)

Who on this list has implemented Dynamips into a production environment?
The answer is going to be no one because it is not built for production. If
that was the goal of these users then I can see the problems with it but it
is not. In fact Cisco themselves have long seen the need for virtual
testing thus IOU was created many years ago for Cisco employees. I used it
extensively as an employee.

Do I think this should all be for free no. I have spent between $100,000 to
$150,000 of my own personally money buying Cisco equipment to study for
tests and to be a good instructor to people that want to learn about Cisco.
Much of it will probably be end of life before this change happens but much
of it I could never afford to get licensing for it all as it is way beyond
the scope of my pay grade. I have equipment similar to a multimillion
dollar company but have the budget of a mom and pop shop.

(This isn't at all speaking of the equipment that is used by IPexpert for
rack rentals as that is not personally mine.) That is more money than
almost anyone on this list so I have invested a great deal into the interest
and the hopes that Cisco continues to be one of the most successful
companies in the future as well.

Cisco needs to implement some type of developer licensing that allows us all
to continue to learn about their products and propagate their agenda or it
will hurt them in the end. Creating a Cisco Developer license would be the
right direction to take and I would gladly purchase a developer license as I
think many others would as well.

When I worked for Cisco in 2007 it was announced from John Chambers that his
goal was to have 50,000 CCIE's by the end of 2010. Now either this goal was
lost in translation to the Learning at Cisco team or there has been a change
in the direction of the program. Or they just haven't worked everything out
to fully bring that goal to fruition.

I think for Cisco's program to continue to grow and allow for them to have a
community of engineers that support and love their products they need to
build a better developer/engineering community that is allowed to use their
products under some type of developer subscription. I think they would find
that many people would be happy to pay to have that right but not doing this
has lead to the current situation. But right now you have a community of
engineers that want to develop their understanding of a product and
contribute to Cisco's end goals being cut at the knees for doing so. In my
opinion that is a very strange relationship.

In nature there is always a symbiotic relationship between predators and
animals that help them. Like sharks have a symbiotic relationship with the
fish remora. The remora help to clean the shark of parasites and keep them
clean and thus the sharks do not eat them.

In my opinion the CCIE community is much like the remora to Cisco. You
don't eat the fish that keep you healthy ;)

Adding another example I will go back to the time I worked at Cisco. I
remember a big contract that we gave millions of dollars worth of equipment
to for pennies just to earn the bigger contracts that we were after. Did it
pay for us in the end? Yes it did.

In the same way having a community of the top engineers continuing to be
comfortable and knowledgeable about Cisco's equipment in the end is going to
be the better pay off for Cisco, at least in my opinion, then cutting off a
large part of the community due to their economic circumstances or lack of
availability to equipment because of not being lucky enough to work for the
right company at the time.

Regards,
 
Tyson Scott - CCIE #13513 R&S, Security, and SP
Technical Instructor - IPexpert, Inc.
Mailto: tscott_at_ipexpert.com
Telephone: +1.810.326.1444, ext. 208
Live Assistance, Please visit: www.ipexpert.com/chat
eFax: +1.810.454.0130

-----Original Message-----
From: nobody_at_groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody_at_groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of Tom
Solski
Sent: Sunday, February 07, 2010 8:36 PM
To: groupstudy
Subject: RE: OT - Cisco plans to restrict using IOS for dynamips!

Are you for real ?

-----Original Message-----

On 2010-02-07 17:34, Iwan Hoogendoorn wrote:
> If this goed trough ,... this is just more proof the whole
> certification track stuff can be 1 big commercial pile ...
>
> I mean ... why be so greedy ...?

It is already present on some of the platforms and will be present
on new ones. Calling a vendor 'greedy' when it is robbed by people not
paying for licenses seems quite a remark. It doesn't hurt people using
normal products, and it would be really a story for Cisco to change
it's multibillion software development path and system just because
'there's dynamips!'. C'mon...

And when CCIE SP moves to - for example - IOS-XR, that's available for
CRS-1, 12k and ASR9k, will you call again Cisco 'greedy'? Because it
would cost a lot to build yourself a home lab out of them?

Think for a moment before spitting out clueless remarks and insult
people or companies. If it doesn't go through the 'wait 30 seconds and
read what I wrote' test, it is not worth sending. And if You don't
look at a CCIE being worth something for you, skip it please. Nobody
forces you to pass it.

-- 
"Everything will be okay in the end. |                  #ukasz Bromirski
 If it's not okay, it's not the end. |       http://lukasz.bromirski.net
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