Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 8 Mar 2004 17:20:38 -0800
From:      Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
To:        Jeffrey Hsu <hsu@freebsd.org>
Cc:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Who wants SACK? (Re: was My planned work on networking stack)
Message-ID:  <20040309012038.GA17083@xor.obsecurity.org>
In-Reply-To: <200403082325.i28NPAa3010399@mtaw6.prodigy.net>
References:  <20040308105641.A47564@xorpc.icir.org> <200403082325.i28NPAa3010399@mtaw6.prodigy.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

--wRRV7LY7NUeQGEoC
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 03:32:37PM -0800, Jeffrey Hsu wrote:
>   >> I know that our organization would love to see SACK. Much of the
>   >> high-performance network development that used to be on FreeBSD has
>   >> moved to Linux simply because SACK is essential. You can't run
>   >> trans-oceanic TCP streams of gigabit or more throughput without it.
>   >
>   > Whenever i hear these comments, i am very annoyed at one thing
>   > (which in a smaller scale repeats all over the place):
>   > people are more than happy to spend big money for things like
>   > routers or bandwidth or any kind of "commercial" stuff, but when
>   > it comes to open source it must be free or nothing.
>   >
>   > I hope it is clear to everyone that an investment in the 50K$
>   > range would provide a professional-grade implementation of SACK
>   > for FreeBSD, and this money is in the noise for any organization
>   > that uses trans-oceanic gigabit links.
>   > The fact that nobody seems to care about funding such a work
>   > either means that whatever is available already fits their
>=20
> What Luigi says is absolutely correct.  It doesn't take a lot to
> get this done.  I've talked to a number of companies about implementing
> SACK for them and while there was interest, no one wanted to fund
> it all themselves, potentially for the benefit of their competitors.
> I know of two that went and did it themselves for FreeBSD --- one
> of which did it wrong and saw zero benefit from SACK and another
> that did it right, but are keeping it proprietary as an edge.  Given
> that Linux and Windows already have it, these and the multiple past
> efforts collectively seem like an unnecessary duplication of work.
> Perhaps if we could pool enough interest, we can raise enough to
> put this issue to rest once and for all.

An angle to try for might be similar to how SoftUpdates was licensed:
distribute the code for a period of time under a suitably restrictive
license, with a provision that after a certain time (e.g. 12 months)
it becomes BSD-licensed.  This allowed Kirk to get commercial funding
for the SU work while also being able to contribute it to end-users
who don't mind the license terms, and eventually for other commercial
users.

Kris

--wRRV7LY7NUeQGEoC
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (FreeBSD)

iD8DBQFATRvmWry0BWjoQKURAgtWAKCiXFMYOtsCK5hnGMa7vngVs4ssCACfWewC
kPeyqA8jhdLG5u+MHov5p6I=
=qH/f
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--wRRV7LY7NUeQGEoC--



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040309012038.GA17083>