[nycbug-talk] Cisco oops....

mlists at bizintegrators.com mlists
Wed May 19 10:28:57 EDT 2004


> >**Updated:* The FBI is investigating the possible theft of source code 
> >for Cisco's main networking device operating system. *
> >
> >http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1594322,00.asp
> >
> >
> >So what are the chances of this worming it's way into Linux, and 
> >possibly BSD? Think anyone would be dumb enough to... well you
> 
> i'd think pretty low, being opensource i would expect a wee bit more 
> peer review would happen before code is merged into the source tree.  
> esp. with the whole SCO fiasco going on with GNU/Linux right now...i'd 
> be more worried if i was a large CISCO client right now, it looks like 
> they yanked the code off an internal solaris machine, so who knows what 
> other info they have.

The thing is, Ciscos are used at many important places, backbones, and
so on, where there is no Linux or BSD. If you crash a company
webserver, well not good, but if you crash their uplink, that is a lot
worse. Also, I'm not so sure Cisco code is very pretty / stable, they
are known to have undocumented comands for example, and since
companies like Cisco and MS make such a big deal of their software, it
just sounds like there might be quite a bit of bugs in there. At least
if anything bad happens, they will get fixed. :)

-bruno




More information about the talk mailing list