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 > > 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
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