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Cisco frowns upon purchasing second hand equipment from "unlicensed" vendors. They claim that their software is non-transferable meaning that you technically d
by aminuit 18y ago
Cisco frowns upon purchasing second hand equipment from "unlicensed" vendors. They claim that their software is non-transferable meaning that you technically don't own any of the IOS that comes with used routers. So if you need an upgrade or security update you are basically screwed until you fork over a ton of money.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/hw_sw_relicensing_program.html http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/hw_sw_relicensing_program.ht...
- omouse 18y agoIsn't their software the Linux operating system? Or are we talking about something else?
- aminuit 18y agoI've never heard of IOS having anything to do with Linux. Cisco owns Linksys now, and most (all?) Linksys routers are based on Linux, but that's no secret. Cisco branded products run some form of IOS, and IOS has always been Cisco secret sauce. A few years ago, some IOS source code was stolen and parts were made public. I think if any of it contained Linux kernel code the Internet would have erupted into fury. On a somewhat related point, Juniper JunOS is based on a BSD variant (FreeBSD I think), but there is no way to know how much is BSD and how much was developed by Juniper. It's a consequence of the BSD license.
- forkqueue 18y agoBut the thieves weren't stealing the routers - they were stealing parts to go in the routers.
- russss 18y agoThe most valuable cards are the supervisor modules, which are the ones which actually run the IOS. But I wouldn't be surprised if the Cisco licensing agreements apply to all their cards. All the cards have some pretty clever distributed forwarding smartness in them.