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 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 and the end-user license agreement at /usr/share/vyos/EULA in any pre-built image for more precise information.