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

I've been a "Cisco guy" for many years now, but (as I'm sure many of you also did) I started many moons ago as a "Microsoft guy". Microsoft did have various solutions for the lab/education/skills development arena such as the (already mentioned) MSDN, MAPS (action pack), and various Eval/Beta licenses. Now many of these models would not be applicable to Cisco's situation keeping in mind some of the legitimate business needs (such as generating revenue) that Cisco faces, but I think a Cisco licensing model could actually open the door for the kinds of solutions this community is looking for. For instance, if hardware had some kind of strong licensing mechanism, wouldn't Cisco be able to dramatically lower the price for some of the hardware since it would be useless without the license to "unlock" various feature sets that are then highly price dependent? This is not an out-of-the-question model as it has been employed by various other vendors, and it would open the door to a !
 "training" license that restricted say number of interfaces and/or PPS throughput, which would accommodate the educational segment while rendering it all but useless to a production environment. Now I agree that dynamips has been useful but it *does* have its limitations and if this is the road for Cisco to eventually get a Sup720 into my home lab with a license that restricts me to ~10kPPS, then I'm all for it.

-Brandon

-----Original Message-----
From: nobody_at_groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody_at_groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of Tyson Scott
Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 11:11 AM
To: '#ukasz Bromirski'
Cc: 'Tom Solski'; 'groupstudy'
Subject: RE: OT - Cisco plans to restrict using IOS for dynamips!

Tukasz,

Great reply. I look forward to the progression of what you have talked
about below. Hopefully it comes to fruition. Cisco is a great company.

I am guessing that Dynamips was probably never on the radar of Cisco
implementing the licensing model. What was on the radar is companies that
take advantage of license agreements and use it in production environments.
I remember working with customers that would have a corporate license but
only have 40-60% of their equipment on the support list and then would
complain and go up the chain to get TAC assistance on stuff not under
contract saying it was an unfortunate oversight. (I will say I live in
Michigan USA so you can guess which companies those were if you look up the
industries in Michigan.) (I do hope the licensing model is better than
checkpoints as that was always a nightmare for me.)

Does licensing suck... yep. Is it necessary... yep. I wrote my long email
because there are people at Cisco that read the emails in this forum and I
want to let them know of the oversight they are missing with this community
as a whole.

As well more than anyone else it is the poorer economic countries that are
going to be the most affected by this change and my understanding is that
those countries are many of the primary targets of Cisco's training
initiatives, at least it was when I was onboard.

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: #ukasz Bromirski [mailto:lukasz_at_bromirski.net]
Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 11:53 AM
To: Tyson Scott
Cc: 'Tom Solski'; 'groupstudy'
Subject: Re: OT - Cisco plans to restrict using IOS for dynamips!

On 2010-02-08 05:43, Tyson Scott wrote:

> 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.

I didn't meant to insult anyone, so if somebody was hit - sorry,
this wasn't the idea. What I found insulting in his post was the idea,
that just because company is selling software it should support all
3rd party addons/extensions/emulators, or else it is 'greedy'.

> 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.

I fully agree. I do also believe that information as it is should
be free, people should be able to read and learn freely, and there should
be no borders for people without $$$ to learn what's important for
them. While I actually work for Cisco, I'm also involved in couple of
Open Source initiatives (for which Cisco doesn't pay), and I'm constantly
challenging our internal teams with questions and concepts that peer out
of "let's sell that!" idea. Not to mention I teach at Network Academy
and do some work that may be viewed as 'working for people' not
'selling Cisco stuff to people'. But let stop it at this point.

> 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 don't but I'm not that interested in Microsoft, however I do get Your
point and I fully support it - that's why I tried numerous times to
discuss freeing some tools Cisco uses internally to broader audience.
We may see that shortly in Cisco Academies through the world (and while
it is surely not my achievement, I'm very happy it will happen
eventually).

> 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.

Sure, me too, and a lot of people I know both within Cisco and externally
uses it. But thinking that Cisco is introducing licensing just to cut out
people using dynamips is silly.

> 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.

Something like this, and a couple of other ideas are circling internally.

> 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.

It would be propably realistic if the world wouldn't change a bit
between 2007 and now. Learning to CCIE, and then paying for having
CCIE is propably too much for companies that without the economic
problems we've faced would be able to - propably.

> 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.

Again, I don't see Cisco doing licensing program just because somebody
did write dynamips. Licensing was on a roadmap from a long ago
(AFAIK just as IOS-XR was put on the paper by Kirk Lougheed and some
other people, but I didn't go deep on that so I may be wrong on the
dates), but in terms of such big company it is a nightmare to
implement it in real life - that's why it took so long and goes only
with new products and it is not backward applicable to the old ones
that are finishing their lifetime.

Actually, author of dynamips was working or was invited (I don't
know details but maybe some others or he himself may fill in them)
to Cisco to discuss with the development some ideas.

> 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.

That's also my idea of going forward. I'm for tools that would
be lightweight enough to use on your personal PC and would
give you ability to look at bigger designs, problems, best
practices etc. And I'm pretty sure such tools will be available
soon, either from Cisco or from other 3rd party companies. They may
be limited somewhat, specially with the higher-end OSes like IOS-XR,
but as PC horespower is constantly going forward, it may be that
control plane of even the beffiest gigants will be available to
train, teach and test.

And to add - I don't know the exact reasons dynamips was halted in it's
development, but I don't think it was Cisco fault.

> Tyson Scott - CCIE #13513 R&S, Security, and SP

I'm a #15929, R&S and SP by the way. But that is entirely out of the
discussion thread :)

Best regards,

-- 
"Everything will be okay in the end. |                  #ukasz Bromirski
 If it's not okay, it's not the end. |       http://lukasz.bromirski.net
Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net