Where we stand on DPI?

Deep Packet Inspection tools are used mostly by ISPs. Corporates use this for IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems), censorship, QoS, etc.

Recently ipoque open sourced its DPI software source code to the public, they did mainly to avoid Privacy problems surrounding DPI Products, get it here.  This open sourced code is almost like wireshark, it  does simple protocol analysis just like any other open source protocol analyzers.  Ipoque open sourced only minimal code, code for encrypted data, analyzing algorithms are still closed source. Somebody tried openDPI on ubuntu.

Most of the DPI product vendors are making huge amount of money through this business, Procera's high end DPI product PL10000's cost is around $800, 000. These product are not made from custom ASICs, and if you are interested there is a paper on DPI on commodity hardware. Here is a simple white paper on DPI. Major vendors of DPI are cisco, juniper, ipoque, bivio, procera,  ipfabrics, arbor etc.

I can see a need to develop an open-source high quality DPI engine based on already existing open-source tools, and there is ample space to sell low cost DPI products based on commodity hardware. See LSI's Tarari range of Network content inspection processors.

Open Software on Open Hardware

I am not talking about openmoko, I am talking about tiny pieces of beautiful hardware modules called tridgets which you can club together to make different functional devices. This is not a toy building blocks (search bug labs in google image search), this will be future. Tridgets came from the term "Trivergence" which means:
a device could be at one place, its data at another, and its controls at a third seemed revolutionary and deserved a name – thus the term “Trivergence.” This definition came from Accenture's Andy Zimmerman last year, this year Accenture tied up with Bug Labs to give services (Accenture Mobility Operated Services) based on this. 

Sun Microsystems, Pitney Bowes, Orange, Antenna Software, and Human Rights Watch are customers or technological partners of this company. This company is a 2 year old startup from NewYork. Recently it raised $16 million through VC.

The thing which attracts me is the beauty of these devices, this is not just another openmoko (open hardware and open mobile stack), openmoko phones are not gorgeous.   Bug Lab opened all  the details of its product's hardware, find all  the specs(including schematics) here. All these devices runs on linux, Happy?

Now it is time to play with these tridgets. Check out "chumby" here .

Open Source Way out

You can try to avoid open source, but it’s probably easier to get out of the IT business altogether. By 2011, at least 80% of commercial software will contain significant amounts of open source code, according to Gartner Research VP Mark Drive.This came from one of the leading IT research firm, let's understand these things in detail:

Factors which drive open source adoption.

Source code is open: Is this really important? This is of no use for end users, end user is only interested in the quality and reliability of product or services he/she uses. He will be interested in low cost software, So the question goes to whether open source create low cost software? yes I think,  it will create low cost software because open source code will create multiple support/service providers and developers (basic economics leads to low cost) to the system, for mutual benefits there is a possibility for contributing back to the main open source project. Open source also create possibility of enthusiastic and research (from academic and government institutions) contributors.

Competing Companies:  Biggest example is Google Microsoft war, Google is considering open source as a good weapon against microsoft. Google's main business is online Ads and services (webapps), for improving its business he needs platforms which permits it, for this Google is creating free and open platforms which will get mass adoption because of Google's fame. Open source tools from Google: Android mobile OS, Google wave, chrome, chrome OS etc are examples.

Non-Software Product Companies: Say Intel is supporting Linux is not a surprise, Intel is using moblin (Linux based netbook products) to market its Atom based processors.Since it is open source, ARM may also play a role in its development, ARM being a strong competitor in the netbooks market. Independent bodies like Linux Foundation plays a great role here to make sure that none of the development in Linux is tailored for any particular companies products, so this make sure that Linux will not end up like UNIX.

See Linux Foundation's report on major contributors in Linux kernel project.

   1. Red Hat: 12.3%
   2. IBM: 7.6%
   3. Novell: 7.6%
   4. Intel: 5.3%
   5. Independent consultant: 2.5%
   6. Oracle: 2.4%
   7. Linux Foundation: 1.6%
   8. SGI 1.6%
   9. Parallels 1.3%
  10. Renesas Technology: 1.3%
  11. Academia: 1.2%
  12. Fujitsu: 1.1%
  13. MontaVista: 1.1%
  14. MIPS Technologies: 1.1%
  15. Analog Devices: 1.0%
  16. HP: 1.0%

Government and Academic Institutions: Government and Academic institutions are playing a major role in the development of open source, by adopting open standards and developing open source solutions. SELinux is developed by NSA. See Open Office implementations. See also apps for america e-governance. CDAC in india developed BOSS operating system supporting most of the Indian languages, thus enabling local computing.

Open Source Business Companies: RedHat, MonVista, Novell (SuSe), Trolltech(now Nokia) all these major companies depend on open source for their bread and butter. See Linux kernel contribution list Redhat (12.3%) and Novell ( 7.6%). These companies are very important because these are the companies which will ship the final commercial product to the customers, these companies fine tune open source solutions to make it commercial grade. On this process they will contribute back to the community, thus enhancing the quality of the open source product.

Personal Fame/Interest/Passion:  This is major factor in the development of open source projects, the Linux Foundation report says 18.2% of Linux is written by people who doesn't link to any company. People will contribute fine quality code to open source projects because of any of these Fame/Interest/Passion.