ubgpsuite/doc/HISTORY.md

2.8 KiB

Micro BGP Suite history

This document summarizes a bit of history of the project, it tells you anything you didn't want to know about ubgpsuite and never cared to ask.

ubgpsuite was created as an evolution over bgpscanner and its companion library, isocore. bgpscanner was originally developed by me starting in 2017 as part of the Isolario Project, under the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the Italian National Research Council IIT-CNR. bgpscanner was covered by the MIT license terms and is still available (as of May 2021) at Isolario's website. Despite the fact that bgpscanner code was developed mostly by me, the help of the Isolario team, their patience, and their knowledge about BGP's nuts and bolts was invaluable to get it rolling.

By mid 2019, my collaboration with IIT-CNR has ceased. In an attempt to further the concepts behind bgpscanner and keep experimenting with them, I started the ubgpsuite project. At this time I was involved with Alpha Cogs, a company I co-founded, so I undertook ubgpsuite development and got it moving forward with its financial support.

ubgpsuite was born by a partial rewrite of bgpscanner, taking advantage of the fact that there was no more interoperability constrain with a larger project -- isocore was originally intended to be used by other components inside the Isolario project as well, but that wasn't the case anymore. This allowed some minor improvement to the codebase, but the overall software architecture was unchanged. Though ubgpsuite was relicensed under the terms of LGPLv3+ for library code and GPLv3+ for utilities and tools. The choice was motivated by my intention to keep the project free (as in freedom) forever, considering that the only reason I was able to continue developing the code I authored at IIT-CNR and keep the project alive was its original open source license.

Unfortunately a chronical lack of time, due to more pressing company priorities, has hit the fan during that year and most of 2020. But finally, by the end of 2020, I got the chance to dedicate some time to the project. As a matter of fact, I left Alpha Cogs and devoted a bit of myself to move ubgpsuite and other projects I cared about out of stagnation. ubgpsuite was then outside Alpha Cogs and became the first of DoubleFourteen Code Forge projects -- 1414° for short, an initiative I founded to research and develop free software, in the hope of improving the software ecosystem.

On 2021, a total rewrite of ubgpsuite was complete and ready for release, with this document included. History of the project will thereafter remain unread.

Keep developing the code you love and enjoy,


Lorenzo Cogotti