The basic idea of OpenFlow is getting the manufacturers to split between making good software and good hardware. If you make great hardware you can continue to

The basic idea of OpenFlow is getting the manufacturers to split between making good software and good hardware. If you make great hardware you can continue to operate, someone else will control the forwarding decisions. If you want to make good software, you can use someone else's hardware. There will be a shakeup because telling the hardware manufacturers their software isn't good enough isn't a great way to start that conversation, but it's inevitable. They will insist that the software is like that for a reason, and to do so is saying the last twenty years of development has been done the wrong way. I think it's highly interesting. I went to school for computer science but found computer networking very interesting. There seems to be a certain level of dismissal in the complexity of networking by people who write applications. Writing a one line java socket that connects to another TCP port is trivial, but the details are tedious. The same way we forget how difficult it is to get phone calls to work because the end result is simple - phones ring. OpenFlow will need to reinvent the wheel unless the existing hardware manufacturers decide to give them a head start, which is unlikely. If it's open source it will evolve quickly, however. There are many difficult decisions and engineering problems to solve, which I suppose is a good sign.