[resonanttoe]

>I think the answer to this is that companies prefer to buy "boxes" over running their own infrastructure. Sure, under the hood it's the exact same thing, but Cisco can market a nice grey box with a logo to your manager and you can't market a Linux kernel tool.

This is spot on. Companies prefer it because it comes with a support contract and defined SLAs.*

The vast majority of companies that don't actively develop infra or software, aren't going to invest in support for OSS . (Think retail companies). They want to buy a solution and that means all of the solution, including support and who they can blame when it catastrophically fails.*

*These may be meaningless most of the time if its a suitably complex problem.

** Also they may just not equipped to actually hire and build the infra in a meaningful way.*

[nieve]

Countdown to Cisco Wireguard with proprietary extensions and all kind of incompatibilities. :(

[pydry]

Likely the only reason wireguard isnt used this way too is because hardware companies havent caught up.

(Maybe they won't)