Sam Newnam, owner of SystemSam Technologies LLC in Raleigh, N.C., has been using the OFR for two weeks on a small Hewlett-Packard Co. rack-mounted server inside a data center he runs as a hosting center for small and midsize businesses in the area. It serves as part of the backup network for the data center.

"We're not running the most complex network in the world, and we didn't to pay lots of money for features we'd never use," he said. "With an open-source package, we could keep things simple."

Looking ahead, Newnam said his business can build more complex networks without large investments by using open-source. "On top of cost savings in production, it opens up a whole new world of testing and brainstorming," Newnam said. "We've often sat around saying this or that would be cool, but we didn't feel like investing in hardware just to see if something works."

Analysts said the Vyatta open-source software release is significant because open-source has been important in numerous areas of computing and is just beginning to grow in networking.

The global routing market for business users is about $3.3 billion, and free open-source routing software is probably displacing only a "very small" part of that total, said Matthias Machowinski, an analyst at Infonetics Research Inc. in Campbell, Calif.