Whither the Firefox of Supplicants?
Firefox rose up and has challenged IE in the browser wars. In the far more esoteric supplicant wars there has yet to be much of a battle at all. The Open1X guys have XSupplicant but I haven’t yet heard it seriously considered in an enterprise deployment. Most of the OS vendors have their own supplicants but these are not consistent in their operation or their supported use-cases. Cisco now has Meetinghouse, and Juniper picked up Funk a while back. This leaves no viable supplicant without OS or equipment vendor alignment. While I hope Meetinghouse and Juniper stay vendor neutral, the industry certainly shouldn’t count on it. I wonder if some bigger vendors like Novell threw some dollars / developers at the XSupplicant guys, could we get a viable open source supplicant in the market fairly quickly? It wouldn’t see deployment in the next few months but then it took a while before Mozilla became Firefox.