5:40 PM -- Vyatta Inc. loves to take digs at Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), and why not? When you're a little open-source company with about one one-billionth of Cisco's market share, you don't have to pull your punches.

To that end, Vyatta claims it's making inroads into the carrier space -- Tier 2 and 3 providers, specifically -- and that the reason is Cisco's pricing. Specifically, memory upgrades under Cisco's markup can run in the thousands of dollars, says Dave Roberts, Vyatta's VP of marketing. (He's saying $5,000, a figure I haven't verified with Cisco.)

By contrast, an entire Vyatta router -- which consists of a store-bought PC with Vyatta's free software on it -- can cost less than the Cisco upgrade.

Cisco's markups are no particular surprise, and we've previously pointed out how this affects things on the optics side. (See Cisco's Secret Franchise.) The practice is helping fuel some choice Vyatta trash-talking, though. "If oil companies had margins as big as Cisco's there would be congressional hearings," Roberts says.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading