Dining with Dave, Mike, Simon, and Tony

This last week, the Vyatta management team sat down to dinner with the Vyatta advisory board. We went to a local restaurant and chatted about all manner of stuff. I think I got the best seat in the house. I had Tony Li (Juniper/Procket/Tropos) across the table, Mike Schroepfer (Mozilla) to my left, and Simon Crosby (XenSource) to my right.

Tony was asking all sorts of technical questions about the Vyatta code base and what changes we thought we needed to make over time. He had several good comments about implementing particular features (QoS and others) and what to avoid. In terms of routing and networking code, Tony has seen it all from an implementation perspective.

Mike shared a bunch of fascinating stories about Mozilla's download infrastructure and how to avoid an international incident surrounding the default "skin" of your Firefox World Cup plugin. (The short story here is that Mozilla released a Firefox plugin that keeps World Cup fans up-to-date on all the latest scores. The plugin also allows you to "skin" your browser with your favorite team colors. It also implements a default skin that comes up the first time. Unfortunately, the plugin was developed here in the USA and somebody who shall remain nameless had the default skin be the USA skin. Of course, the USA is nowhere in World Cup and this only resulted in a lot of tweaked global fans outside the USA. Doh! ;-) )

Simon was all about marketing. I got peppered with a list of questions surrounding our model and where we were going. We discussed the upcoming 1.0 milestone and how we help support the community as it moves from trials and testing to actual deployment.

Dave Newman was a bit down the table, but I could hear him discussing DECnet at one point. Ah, those were the days. ;-)

This was a great evening. Everybody was double-checking our work and giving us great suggestions for how to move forward with Vyatta, based on their extensive experiences in the networking and open-source worlds. As I drove home, I couldn't help but think we have a rocking advisory board! These guys are great.