"Your $799 subscription" sales pitch is what I mean. If you want to prompt it as a deal just post a separate post instead of attacking the most valuable contributor of this site and the servethehome community.
First of all, what "$799 subscription sales pitch"? I don't represent or work for Cumulus - I also mentioned ICOS and Switchdev as examples of free-as-in-beer alternatives.
Second of all, it's not an attack on
@fohdeesha - I actually worked with him on the
thread regarding the Arista 40GbE switches, looking at logs and adding (hopefully helpful) comments, and I have much respect for his work. More importantly I also have access to Arista EOS legally as part of my $dayjob.
Re-read what I am actually saying:
a) Factually speaking,
@fohdeesha is currently the only person that I know of who modifies EOS for both Arista and non-Arista switchgear. if he drops off the radar (for various reasons, having a SigOth and needing to spend AFK time being one of them), well, that's it. And yes, someone would have to pick up his mantle - there are legal risks to what he is doing, and not everyone that has the technical knowledge would want to risk it.
That's because -
b) Running modified EOS on this switchgear is a grey area. EOS is only licensed to be used in Arista gear, and what you are getting from something like EOS is a modified Linux kernel+userland, and the binary blob and shims (kext/drivers) that talks to the switch ASICs - which is not open source and is something that Arista only validated for their equipment and paid for by their customers/subscribers. If you pay for Arista support and have legal access to EOS, great - you are still modifying their stuff to run it on non-Arista...which Arista will not be thrilled about. If you don't, you have even less to stand on.
It's not Linux itself that makes it legally problematic, it's the binary blobs and shims (ASIC drivers) bundled within that makes the switch work. Some of the open source distros include it (maybe an older version with blessing from Broadcom, Marvell or whichever ASIC maker you are dealing with), others require licensing (probably what you are paying for with something like Cumulus). It would be a great day if someone reverse engineer the ASICs and create a clean room, open source drivers for the switch ASICs, but it doesn’t exist, and until that day, you have to buy, borrow or steal. If you are not buying, do you consider yourself borrowing...or stealing?
It's legally the same as running Juniper JunOS or Checkpoint Gaia on something outside of their hardware, Cisco IOS on GNS3, MacOS on a Hackintosh - you are not supposed to do it (that's still true regardless of whether you are a current customer with legitimate access or not), but it's somewhat tolerated, or at least the lawyers for those companies didn’t consider it to be enough of an issue to go bother the hobbyists, but legally speaking, they are in the right and totally could put a stop to it - Apple went after Psystar and Cisco sent lawyers after people who unwisely bundled old IOS images on GNS3 and tried to sell them. Just because some end users here might be nonchalant about it doesn't make it a non-issue. If
@fohdeesha gets lots of interest from hobbyists for modded EOS, that's great - but I am betting that a majority of interest came from people who already has legal access to the software in question but want the convenience of the mods that he made. But like I said, be aware of the legal ramifications - if the lawyers from Arista comes a-knocking, that distinction won't make much difference. I don't encourage others to do it, but ultimately, the choice is yours. I certainly don't think it's arrogance or ego for me to point this out, or whatever I am posting about alternatives it doesn't make it automatically a sales pitch.
c) This is a whitebox switch. Great for hobbyist use, but for enterprise use, unless you have an entire team behind you (and access to a legit distribution - something free like ONIL), it's not great. It's also from a vendor that turned its back on it (similar to the HPe EC200A saga, and partially why I threw my money behind an Arista instead). This is the 4th or 5th thread regarding the Celestica, and It's also not the first time someone mentioned the Atom C2xxx as being a ticking time-bomb (didn't Patrick make a video out of it less than 5 days ago?!), which should make you think twice.