I recently had the opportunity (actually, it was a couple of opportunities) to speak to Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy and marketing at Vyatta about the company’s open-source networking platform. It’s an interesting product, and as yet a bit of a departure for the hosting business in terms of the way these services are deployed
As usual, many of the key elements of the conversation made it into the article we posted on the site, but much more was said about the Vyatta community (it is open source software, after all) that helps to further fill out the picture of Vyatta the product. It seemed, as it often does, like excellent fodder for the blog
First, a lengthier explanation of the model Vyatta uses to package its open source product (Red Hat versus MySQL)
“Essentially, there are a variety of open source business models; what we typically call here, just for convenient shorthand, the MySQL model and the Red Hat model. In the MySQL model, a company writes all its code and then releases it as open source. So if you go to the MySQL website, you’re basically getting code that’s written 100 percent by MySQL with contributions from the outside world. If you go to Red Hat, you’re essentially getting a distribution that is pulling components from all over. Red Hat incorporates MySQL, a Linux kernel, Apache, Perl and all these other components and pulls them all together in a distribution and gives you some hooks to be able to manage it. We are more like the Red Hat model than the MySQL model; we are pulling together components from other places, but we’re also doing a lot of our own work to integrate those components.”
This difference translates into a difference in the way the user interacts with the company’s support, and with the product itself:
“Our fundamental belief is that Red Hat’s community is different than MySQL’s community because of how things are done. So if you discover a bug in MySQL, you’re going to send it to MySQL, not to Red Hat, even though Red Hat incorporates MySQL. What you would submit to Red Hat are patches to Red Hat’s specific stuff.
To a certain extent, our community is the sum total of all the communities of all the projects that we incorporate.”
Finally, Roberts offered an explanation of who he envisions using the product, and how he sees that relationship contributing to the development of the Vyatta platform, both within the user’s system and at the top level:
“We’re designing for people who want to deal with our package exclusively, but we make it fully available for people that want to go deeper. Our philosophy is to present something that is very highly integrated and wrapped up, and is Vyatta, as opposed to just a collection of packages, even though we’re not ashamed of the packages we use and we don’t try to hide that. We’ll tell you flat out what’s in there
One of the things we see as an advantage is its based on Linux. So even though we’re trying to provide a nice experience that is one of a traditional proprietary appliance in terms of being highly integrated - the fact that you can jump down to the Linux level, which we don’t prevent you from doing at all, is an advantage to people. And you can extend the system, because it’s based on Linux, with other Linux packages.
Essentially we’re compatible with a Debian package format, and so you can add Debian packages to a Vyatta system. For instance, we don’t ship it this way, but if you wanted to run MySQL on your router, you could. If you wanted to extend it with another package we don’t yet provide, you could. You’ll lose some integration when you do that. You’re going to have to administer MySQL at the Linux level. You’re not going to do that in the nice GUIs and shells that we provide.
One of the goals that we have over time is to allow the community to provide that level of integration for different packages that they find beneficial. And that’s something that we see to a certain extent in the Red Hat community.
If I had to discuss the differences between the MySQL community and the Red Hat community - the MySql community is more of a developer community that is working on MySQL itself. The Red Hat community is more of an integrator community. So they’re taking other packages that they find interesting for which red hat doesn’t have any official distribution and basically making them red hat compatible.”
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