JunOS: It Doesn’t Exist!
If there’s one thing that drives me nuts, it’s the abundant use of “JunOS”. No, not the industry-leading network operating system, but the actual spelling of the software (and yes, sorry to say, it’s software – certainly not firmware as many seem to refer to it).
Let’s start with a bit of a history lesson. Juniper was founded in 1996, and not long after, their M40 router running “JUNOS” in hit the market in 1998. This release was groundbreaking in that the service provider market now had a new kid on the block, a router that did what the current market leader, Cisco, did not do – separated the control plane from the forwarding plane and made forwarding decisions entirely in silicon. JUNOS was the operating system that ran on these new “M-Series” routers, and was based heavily on FreeBSD, which is one of the oldest open source operating systems, and is a direct descendant of the original BSD UNIX.
Skip forward about 10 years, and Juniper goes through a (much needed) rebranding. Gone are the cartoons, and now the Juniper website looks like it means serious business. JUNOS gets re-branded as “Junos”, and a “burst” logo is attached. (An interesting side note: I had originally called it a “flower” and was corrected immediately - however, the official registered trademark states “The mark consists of the stylized word “JUNOS” and a six-petaled flower with a twelve-point star design contained therein.”)
The name Junos is actually not even an acronym. Many people believe Junos means “Juniper Operating System”, when in fact Junos is a proper noun, DERIVED from “Juniper Networks Operating System”. It is this misconception that seems to have propagated and now it seems commonplace to see the trademark written incorrectly as “JunOS”. I would guess that this drives Juniper’s PR department nuts.
In fact, as Junos is a noun and not an acronym, it’s very much commonplace to see “Junos Operating System” in Juniper technical documents and white papers. This would obviously be horrible grammar if it were actually an acronym.
So there you have it. Please, for the sake of the sanity of both myself and everyone working for Juniper’s PR and marketing departments, stop calling it JunOS, else I might start talking about Cisco iOS.
Links for your perusal:
So what you’re saying is that calling JunOS makes you as angry as going to the ATM machine when you forget your PIN number to get cash for a NIC card?
^^ Best comment ever.
That was so much win … So true how the world does these silly wording etc. Gg junIPer JunOS …
Hear, hear.