So much for stealth mode

Well, I think Vyatta is out of stealth-mode now. We officially launched the Vyatta community around open source networking this morning with a press release.

Last night, Om Malik blogged about us. Today, we're getting all sorts of inbound calls wanting all manner of information, everything from whether we have a vendor for Vyatta logo merchandise (yes, already done) to whether small investors can buy our stock (no, because we're still privately funded).

I have already done a couple of off-the-cuff interviews today, including one for Network World this morning. The good news is that most people are grokking the value proposition and what we're trying to do.

Some of the articles are portraying this as Vyatta trying to kill Cisco. That makes for good drama, but I think that's a bit over the top. This is about returning the Internet to its open source roots, providing customers a more cost effective, flexible, and secure option for running their networks. That's something we all benefit from.

To give a proof point around that, one of the calls I took this morning was from a guy who had been referred to us by somebody who saw the Business 2.0 article. It turns out the guy ran an ISP in Africa and wanted something cost effective that can do both routing and WiFi. We still need to do some work to get WiFi working, but if somebody gets a hankering to get it done before us, the code is all there.