Thanks to open source software, we can now take control over and modify the behavior of almost every component in an IT system. We can modify everything from the networking stack in the kernel all the way down to web server code in user space to make improvements or implement new features.
The final hurdle to having complete control over our hardware and software stack is the physical network hardware. These devices are usually built from the open source tools we love, but they are presented as black boxes that can’t easily be modified by network operators.
