InternetNews published an article “Cisco Goes Deep for Linux and Open Source” by Sean Michael Kerner today. It highlights Cisco’s adoption of Linux and key contributions to open source software. The article, in a surprising bit of openness, shares some statements from Cisco executives about their uses of Linux and… well, just read:

“The initial condition is that we don’t want to burn cycles on engineering and development to build from a stock kernel up,” (Michael) Enescu (CTO of Open Source Initiatives at Cisco) said. “We start with a distribution and we have a very good relationship with Red Hat and MontaVista.”

What a nice thing to read on a Friday afternoon. Another quote from Michael inspired some commentary:

“We have both Red Hat and MontaVista as supplier to us. Occasionally there are pieces of a distro that we need to treat differently.”

What I find compelling about this statement is that it shows how what we call “roll-your-own” Linux is really a spectrum of behaviors. Most companies who embrace Linux and open source don’t do everything themselves or buy everything off the shelf. They are hybrids. Some custom, some stock.

It is how a vendor helps you to walk that gray area between stock and custom that can be the real differentiator. More on that later.

Last week MontaVista demo’ed the first version of our MID (Mobile Internet Device) platform. Our man-on-the-scene Dan Cauchy filmed a video showing it off. Excuse the sasquatch sighting style video… I guess he was hand holding it.

Maybe we’ll spring for a monopod for the flip camera

So just clearing out some stuff that I had meant to mention earlier but got too wrapped up in some irritating hardware issues.

Addressing the Top 5 Pains of Linux System Build and Design: Our friend and colleague Klaas van Gend is running this webinar tomorrow. Run like a Forrest Gump and go register right now. Why? Because Klaas knows his stuff cold. He is one of those people who I learn from each and every time he speaks. What makes listening to Klaas fun is that he’s opinionated and has a lot of knowledge all up and down the software stack. He’ll be rambling on real-time one moment and the next he’s discussing cryptographic trust networks.

Got a Twitter account? If you do and you are in to it you are welcome to follow MontaVista’s tweets. We tweet on the obviously named mvista Twitter account.

Today’s hardware irritations: not being able to find my SATA power cable that I ordered and lost in this slovenly office of mine. Two hard drive crashes within 3 months of each other. HDMI CEC commands that cause my A/V receiver to flip to the wrong input.

Today’s software loves: Puppet! When my laptop drive went kaput I was in the middle of upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10. I decided that I would take no system administration actions without recording what was being done as part of my Puppet manifest. When my laptop hard drive died I reinstalled Ubuntu, installed puppet and git, cloned my git repo that had my Puppet manifest in it, and then ran Puppet. After about 15 minutes all of the system tweaks I think are essential were up and running. Very cool!