THE OPEN SOURCE DIVIDE: WHY NETWORK ENGINEERS ARE STILL FIGHTING YESTERDAY’S BATTLES
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: while software developers enjoy a thriving open source ecosystem, network engineers are stuck running production networks on abandoned tools with unpatched vulnerabilities.
RANCID has CVEs from 2008 that remain unfixed. TACACSGUI only supports Ubuntu 18.04 (end-of-life 2023) with documentation saying “under construction.” SNMPv1 and v2c transmit credentials in plaintext. Yet we keep using them because switching costs are massive and alternatives are scarce.
The contrast with software development is brutal.
Kubernetes has thousands of contributors and backing from Google, Red Hat, and Microsoft. React has Meta’s full-time maintainers. After Heartbleed exposed OpenSSL surviving on $2,000/year, the industry rallied with millions in coordinated funding.
Networking? Never had its Heartbleed moment. Just engineers making do with years-old tools.
It’s not all bleak. FRR is excellent – active development, comprehensive protocols, production-grade. NetBox is the industry standard for network source-of-truth. When networking OSS gets proper backing, it thrives.
But here’s the frustrating part: the industry created OpenConfig, gRPC telemetry, and YANG models, then abandoned the tooling. Cisco’s YANG Explorer? Dead. pyangbind? Unmaintained. One engineer captured it perfectly: “All I wanted was to browse YANG models. Everything is abandoned.”
Why the gap?
Business models. Cloud providers profit when open source thrives. Network vendors built empires on hardware lock-in – Cisco’s proprietary protocols created walled gardens. Open source threatens those margins.
Community size matters. Millions of software developers create self-sustaining ecosystems. Networking has a fraction of that, more siloed, with different incentives.
Hardware dependency creates barriers. Software devs iterate on laptops. Network engineers need expensive equipment to test line-rate performance.
Hyperscalers prove it’s possible. SONiC powers Microsoft Azure. Meta and Google built custom solutions. But they have scale, budget, and talent most enterprises lack.
The technology exists. The business models, funding, and culture to operationalize it don’t. Until vendor incentives change and tooling catches up, network engineering will keep fighting battles software development won a decade ago.
What’s your experience? Does this match your reality?
NetworkEngineering OpenSource NetworkAutomation Infrastructure
