A few weeks back, one of The Tolly Group's testing clients got a fair bit of press when it announced test results showing that its open source, Fast Ethernet router outperformed Cisco's 2821 Integrated Services Router.
"Twice the performance at half the price"
The emergence of enterprise-class, open source solutions is yet another chapter in a "commodity vs special-purpose" battle that has been raging for several decades now. Well on its way to becoming IT's version of The Thirty Years War, the struggle has gone hot and cold over the years -- but it has never stopped.