Either you get it or you don't

I've been speaking to folks about Vyatta publicly for about 6 weeks now and there really seem to be two camps of people who I met - those who get open source and those that don't. Those that don't get it usually greet me with a chorus of "you need custom hardware to build a router" (wrong - strike one), "you need routing done in hardware to perform at the level that most enterprises need" (wrong - strike two) or "routing is so complicated only Cisco and Juniper can get it right" (wrong - strike three). We, and many others, have shown that open source router and firewall software combined with commodity hardware can suit the needs of an enterprise.

To prove my point, here are some other things I do get:

• Jerry and Elaine love each other and should never date other people
• U2 is the best rock band of the past 25 years
• Linux is at the core of many profitable and successful enterprise devices and applications
• You put on the jelly first and then the peanut butter
• Moby Dick, the whale, was neither good nor evil. Same for Captain Ahab.
• The San Francisco Giants were 8 outs away with a 5 run lead in 2002 to win the World Series and still lost
• Open source software is being used throughout many enterprises for webservers, application middleware and databases
• MC Hammer's pants should have never left his closet in the 80s
• The Blackberry is cool, but the Treo is cooler
• MPLS is the new ATM which was the new Frame Relay which was the new X.25
• Vanilla ice cream goes well with nearly everything

Like I said, some folks get it, some don't.