Networking Pearl Harbor in the Making

Mon Nov 7 17:39:31 UTC 2005

On Nov 7, 2005, at 12:16 PM, Todd Vierling wrote:

> On Mon, 7 Nov 2005, Christian Kuhtz wrote:
>
>>> How so? Haven't we recently seen an across the board bug in
>>> multiple version of $vendor code?
>>
>> And that's evidence of what other than nobody is willing to pay  
>> for what it
>> takes to get better code out of $vendor?
>>
>> Code can be built better.  It just isn't always economical to do so.
>
> In some business models.
>
> Financial reports regularly hint that $vendor has margins far  
> exceeding the
> costs necessity to clean up security-critical code.  When the  
> aggregate
> margins drop thanks to folks choosing $vendor2 because $vendor has  
> decided
> to let security flaws stew, it's time for $vendor to reevaluate that
> business model -- at least a little.

Apparently they're still in business, and they're making money, and  
that means people are still buying their stuff.  And as long as  
that's true, nothing will change.  Correlating a margins over a very  
large product range with bugs specifically in service provider gear  
is problematic in my opinion.  Apples v Oranges.  Whatever, it really  
doesn't matter.

Reliability should be engineered by the SP, not exclusively expected  
from any one vendor.  And you can improve reliability by using same  
devices in a particular fashion, not just by using different devices,  
which was my whole point about calculating reliability in the first  
place.

Thanks,
Christian