.. _history:

#######
History
#######

In the beginning...
===================

There once was a network operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux,
called Vyatta. [*]_ 2006 onwards, it was a great free software
alternative to Cisco IOS and Jupiter JUNOS. It came in two editions:
Vyatta Core (previously Vyatta Community Edition) that was completely
free software, and Vyatta Subscription Edition that had proprietary
features and was only available to paying customers. [*]_

Vyatta was acquired by Brocade Communication Systems in 2012. Shortly
after, Brocade renamed Vyatta Subscription Edition to Brocade vRouter,
discontinued Vyatta Core and shut down the community forum without a
notice. The bug tracker and Git repositories followed next year.

It's worth noting that by the time Brocade acquired Vyatta,
development of Vyatta Core was already stagnated. Vyatta Subscription
Edition (and thus, Vyatta development as a whole) had been replacing
core components with proprietary software, meaning few features made
it to Vyatta Core, and those that did were bug-ridden and hamstrung.

In 2013, soon after Vyatta Core was abandoned, the community forked
the last Vyatta Core version (6.6R1) and VyOS Project came into being.
`Sentrium SL <https://blog.vyos.io/sentrium-what-sentrium>`_ was
established by VyOS maintainers in 2014 to fund VyOS development by
selling support, consulting services and prebuilt long-term support
images.

Brocade was acquired by Broadcom in 2016 and sold what remains of
erstwhile Vyatta to AT&T in 2017, who in turn sold it to Ciena in 2021.


A note on copyright
===================

Unlike Vyatta, VyOS never had (nor will ever have) proprietary code.
The only proprietary material in VyOS is non-code assets, such as
graphics and the trademark "VyOS". [*]_ This means you can build your
own long-term support images (as the entire toolchain we use is free
software) and even distribute them, given you rename it and remove
such assets before building. Although note that we do not provide
support for images distributed by a third-party. See the
`artwork license <https://github.com/vyos/vyos-build/blob/current/LICENSE.artwork>`_
and the end-user license agreement at ``/usr/share/vyos/EULA`` in
any pre-built image for more precise information.


.. [*] From the Sanskrit adjective "Vyātta" (व्यात्त), meaning opened.
.. [*] A business model comparable to that of Redis, rather than that
       of VyOS today.
.. [*] This is not unlike how Linus Torvalds owns the trademark "Linux".