Is there an open source router in your future?

My fellow StillSecure blogger, Mitchell Ashley has jumped right in with his article on "The market for open source routers".  Mitchell is commenting around the recent announcement and commentary surrounding Vyatta's announcement releasing an open flexible router based upon the Xorp OSS project out of Berkley. The buzz around this release made it all the way to slashdot.  I think most people are intrigued that this little open source start up is daring to go where giants have  failed before.  I think the sentiment may have been best summed up by Thomas Ptacek at Matasano Security, (who BTW, if you don't read their blog, you should, they are sharp, sharp security people and will also be at Black Hat in force), who states that Vyatta is not keeping Cisco up at night.

The crux of the push back was, that the cost of lower-level routers are already so cheap, that cost is not a factor in choosing the open source alternative. Also Vyatta has enunciated a vision that frankly has already failed, why would it succeed now.  Mitchell, makes some good points on this.  He points out that classic open source tools such as Snort, Nessus and MySQL actually sneak in under the wire by early adopters because they are free and can be implemented in a limited enough way.  Here I don't necessarily agree with Mitchell.  That may have been fine for those particular open source tools, I don't think that is compelling enough to make me throw out my cheap Cisco gear.  Also, what is the footprint and form factor of the hardware?  All questions I would ask.

So, is there an open source router in your future? I think there may be, but it may not be just a router.  I think the hint is in Mitchell's last line: "An OSS router is certainly interesting but it's more than just about routing."  If you look at the router as a platform, what else can you put up there that would make you want to throw out that old Cisco hunk, and play with something that really piques your interest.  Is that the "Converging Network" vision?  I think we will hear more from Mitchell on this.