> I was just reading the April's issue of the Communications of the ACM (the
> flagship magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery), and noticed
> that OpenBSD and its developers were mentioned in one article, in a rather
> negative way:
>
> "Unfortunately, there is a segment of the open source community that
> is
> incapable of playing well with others, when those others don't play
> the way
> they want them to. For those who have not had to deal with these
> people, it's
> a bit like talking to a four-year-old. When you explain
> checkers to your
> niece, she might decide that she doesn't like your
> rules and follows her own
> rules. You humor her, she's being creative,
> and this is amusing in a
> four-year-old. If you were playing chess with a
> colleague who suddenly told
> you that the king could move one, two, or
> three places in one go, you would
> be pissed off, because this person
> would obviously be screwing with you, or
> insane. Have I lost my mind?! What does this have to do with VRRP or network
> protocols? The
> OpenBSD team, led as always by their Glorious Leader (their
> words, not
> mine), decided that a RAND license just wasn't free enough for
> them.
> They wrote their own protocol, which was completely incompatible with
> VRRP. Well, you say, that's not so bad; that's competition, and we all
> know
> that competition is good and brings better products, and it's the
> glorious
> triumph of Capitalism. But there is one last little nit to this
> story. The
> new protocol dubbed CARP (Common Address Redundancy
> Protocol) uses the exact
> same IP number as VRRP (112). Most people, and
> KV includes himself in this
> group, think this was a jerk move. "Why
> would they do this?" I hear you cry.
> Well, it turns out that they
> believe themselves to be in a war with the
> enemies of open source, as
> well as with those opposed to motherhood and apple
> pie. Stomping on the
> same protocol number was, in their minds, a strike
> against their enemies
> and all for the good. Of course, it makes operating
> devices with both
> protocols in the same network difficult, and it makes
> debugging the
> software that implements the protocol nearly impossible."
> Here is the link to the article:
> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/4/147357-the-network-protocol-battle/abstr
> act
>
> If you are not a member of the ACM, you can read it in ACM Queue, in which it
> was published in January: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2090149
>
> I somehow feel this is a very distorted view of what really happened. Perhaps
> it would be good if somebody "official" wrote a Letter to the Editor
> (Communications of the ACM publish them in every issue)?
I've seen this discussed in a few places. It is completely distorted.
This will be my only mail about this, because there are always people
who want to rewrite history and the that author is one of them.
We have the email archives of the private communications with IETF,
IANA, Cisco, HP, Nokia, and other organizations to try to solve this
protocol/service issue going back almost 2 years before we released
the first CARP and pfsync code outside our group.
IANA refused to give us new unique protocol and service number because
we had not gone through the process of following the rules layed out
by the IETF VRRP guys.
Yet, we had discussions all the way up to the top to try to
solve this. Let me quote the signature from one email -- and I had more
than 30 emails with this guy trying to find a way out of this:
Robert Barr
Patent Counsel
Cisco Systems
408-525-9706
Robert Barr was the one who could have said: Sure, we abandon the claim
of HSRP on VRRP, and guess what? We'd have simply gone to VRRP.
My vrrp email folder has 145 emails in it, all of them leading up to
the point where we abandoned efforts to work with IETF/IANA/Companies
and instead deployd a new protocol. THE TERMS GIVEN TO USE WERE
IMPOSSIBLE.
IANA was saying that there was *no way in hell* that we would get new
protocol or service numbers, unless we submitted our work to a
standards commitee and let them mangle it. Unlike the CACM author,
we're not stammering idiots. We know exactly what would have
happened. CARP would have been absorbed into IETF's VRRP plan and
spat out the other side in a few years with all the patent glue stuck
to it again.
There were too many people with big skin in the battle, since Alcatel
and Cisco were using the super lame VRRP / HSRP patent issue as one of
the components in some huge patent battles they had going on at the
time.
As a result of the big companies being involved in a patent war, IANA
abrogated their responsibility of being responsible, and instead
decided to be as spiteful and unrecognizing of the reason why we had
invented CARP. Players in their midst were not toing to let an open
source alternative to a patented protocol come into being, when VRRP
was the very first RAND-licenced patented standard ever to come into
existance.
Everyone knows that the HSRP / VRRP patent thing is a load of bull.
But since this was the foundation of the RAND rules at IETF, noone
wants to back down on that one. They'll back down on 200 other
patents first.
The story of this is described in the artwork for our 3.5 release, in the
left-hand column of http://openbsd.org/lyrics.html#35
Finally, unlike what the author says, VRRP and CARP interoperate just
fine today. In the early days, when a few vendors had really buggy
VRRP their routers crashed. But that is a reliablility/security problem,
since anyone could have injected such packets to cause those crashes.
And which vendors would those be? HMM. I WONDER! Why, they'd be the
ones who I accuse of using their considerable clout at the IETF and
IANA to not give us unique numbers we can use.
After all, anyone can tell that the /etc/protocols file is full!
We went through every single step of politics to try to solve things.
Then we decided to deploy on the same fashion as VRRP, but with the
version number cranked. We told all the people at IANA, IETF and
Cisco that we were going to take this action. I just re-read that
mail.
At that point, they declined to ever reply again. Who's the child now?
I will quote something one chunk of mail from Robert Barr at
Cisco:
From: "Robert Barr " <rb...@cisco.com>
To: "'Theo de Raadt'" <dera...@cvs.openbsd.org>
Subject: RE: Patent claims on VRRP
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 20:33:25 -0700
I hope CARP is successful, I really do.
Please think about my risk management comments tho. I am not trying to win
any argument, just sharing my reality.
The author of the ACM article is a whining pathetic liar who lives in
the heart of the land where those powerful vendors operate. It would
be really difficult for him to have another opinion on this matter. He's
also a FreeBSD developer.
On the other hand, the ACM should be ashamed for having allowed that to
be published. That, I think they should be contacted about. Except check
out this URL:
http://www.acm.org/acmelections/Secretary-Treas_G_Neville-Neil.pdf
See how this works? George V. Neville-Neil is total slimeball. Follow
the money and influence.
