I have been following the fuzz about the integration of switching emulation in the new 2014 release of GNS3.
Have signed up for early release but noticed that this has now gone to Crowd Funding status and the only members that will possibly have access to this new version of GNS3 will be the ones who donate X amount of money.

I can be mistaken but, i think i can see the end of the road on this.
GNS3 (OSS) will be available for X amount of money in a very near future, and a crappy release will be available for free.
Am i right? Is this me or are you guys seeing this too?

Is Cisco behind this development? I can see where this is going. It always starts with crowd funding or a similar solution pertaining that the software will always be free but it always ends with a good version being available for money (profitability) and another crappy release for the public.

Cisco, Juniper, who's behind this?

Let me know your opinions and thoughts on this.

If i'm wrong please just through a rock at me.

NL

I won't throw a rock at you but I do think you are wrong.

The way I read it is GNS3 v1.0 final will be ready in about a year and it will be free. If you make a contribution now you will have access to the development releases until the final version is released, so that's kind of the opposite of what you are saying.

I do have a couple of concerns though...

1. Switching emulation will be via IOU running on a virtual machine which I assume you can drag and drop in to your GNS3 topologies. So why not just use IOU?

2. CCIE is moving on to blueprint v5.0 soon which I am sure will require IOS 15.x. So once again we will most likely have to use VMs running IOU to get routers with IOS 15 code. So why not just use IOU?

Hi Robert, hope you are right, lets see what happens!

Regarding to ASIC emulation, imo its impossible but there surly will be a way to simulate L2/3 switchinig along with all the features needed.
Iv tried IOU a couple of times and its kinda wired, not something i like but they could grab that code to incorporate it into gns3 some how.

Hope this will continue as free full featured software.

NL

This is exactly this. We are not Cisco nor Juniper, using the funds the software is going to be a lot better quality and all our users will benefit in the end, even if they don't contribute to the campaign! We have chosen the crowdfunding road to avoid raising funds from investors and ending up making a crappy software or not the one our users really want. The community stays in control of the software and I am so happy to see so many people believing in us :) I am sure Stephen will have more comments soon...

I do have a couple of concerns though...



IOU is designed to only work on Linux or UNIX Solaris. Our current plan is to just use IOU on Linux and thru a VM on Windows/OSX, this may change as we will look more into it to find the best possible way.



IOU has its advantages but you can also run IOS 15.x using a c7200 router in GNS3. In the end, we want to give our user the maximum possibilities.



I hope we prove you were right to contribute to the software (thanks by the way!)



Our goal has and will always be to provide the software for free but I hope you won't be mad if we indirectly monetize it in a way that help our community. GNS3 is my only job now and all the crowdfunding money is going to hiring, development and training, so nothing for me but I expect have a salary at some point next year ;)

Thanks so much guys. This has been a crazy night and we barely slept :)

_________________
Jeremy, GNS3 Programmer & Benevolent Dictator for Life.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/softwar ... mparisons/

Pica8 from the above article, claim to making a vASIC for their Network operating System, I read it on the 26/11/2013, can't remember the link

Ok then why will people pay money when ultimately the s/w will be free . There must some special privilege for the members who are donating even 40$? Its a hard-earned money so it shouldn't be totally free ,or some special package for those who contributes ,some features reserved only for members part from training and etc etc.
Also,if someone contributes 40$ won't he get the latest package in case of several updates ?

Answering this from my personal perspective... I contributed because I had seen how great GNS3 < 1 was... and wanted to support the development of GNS3 going forward. Not beacuse I wanted features that other people didn't have,

The privileges depend on your donation... e.g early access, training etc as detailed on the crowdfunding page.


I'm not quite sure what you mean by this? If you asking will you get the latest version... Yes... and every single version that comes after it!

_________________
Daniel
Forum Moderator & Debian Package Maintainer for GNS3, Dynamips & VPCS.
Standalone DEB Packages are available from http://gns3.serverb.co.uk - To be updated!