The networking world has been abuzz with talk of VMWares NSX announcement, Cisco’s CTO response to that, and heavy speculation of what that means.  If you’re curious about NSX, Ivan Pepelnjak over at ioshints has a great write up explaining what it is and isn’t.  I enjoyed the read quite a bit. Speculation generally makes me jittery, so I have spent some time thinking about this, reading and trying to understand. I’ve come to the conclusion that  I am by no means an expert in enterprise networking.  That being said, some of the responses to these arguably groundbreaking announcements are troubling to me. Let me preface this by saying that I lean more towards the Richard Stallman style than the John Chambers mindset (although I’ll always claim to be more like Boba Fett). I am not a fan of being forced into an ecosystem.  I like open, standard protocols.  This is why the