On Tue, 7 Jan 2025 18:02:54 +1000, Tashi Phuntsho toebinoz@gmail.com said:
Hi Cherry, Appreciate the forward and encouraging participation :-)
I would like to echo the symbiosis between the NOG and FOSS communities not just in Bhutan, but across the wider industry.
Bhutan Telecom (DrukNET to be precise) lead by Ganga sir/Jichen sir/Norbu sir et al, was where the seeds of FOSS in Bhutan were sown in the late 90s. BSD used to be the defacto OS then at DrukNET (with gradual shift to Red Hat and Debian based systems), along with most netops and network services tools.
Hello Tashi,
Thanks so much for that informative history - as a NetBSD developer (and a former FreeBSD one) i'm very pleased to see that BSD was used! (I assume FreeBSD ?).
DrukNET/BT, Tashi Infocomm, DrukREN, and NSRC were the early founders and supporters of btNOG, which ensured its sustainability over the past 11 years (with help from other funding agencies and the efforts from group of volunteers).
The workshops offered at btNOG (DNS, NetSec/InfoSec, Systems Admin, Network Management, etc) have always been based on FOSS tools
What I find interesting is that the folks that worked on FOSS that I have come across (both in Bhutan and other places) have done very well in their careers. This is not an accident, in my experience.
(excepting Router/Switch OSes).
it's hard to compete the cisco (and now huawei) ecosystem - but for eg: IIJ routers which runs Japan's ISP backbone still uses FOSS (Used to be NetBSD, but Maz, who I met at btnog24 last year, told me they are/have transitioned to linux now).
I'd be curious to see what tradeoffs are possible with modern ISP requirements - I believe there are optimisations such as Edge router virtualisation etc. that have now come in, due to the IPv6 + IoT usecase explosion.
Interesting times!