On Amiga we have been graced with AmiTCP, Termite TCP, Miami, Genesis, and probably other TCP/IP stacks about which I do not know. IIRC, these mutated from an original stack produced by Commodore (AS225?) and all offer some compatibility to what appears to be ubiquitous among Amiga, the bsdsocket.library.
So I read about how Gibson Research decried the raw socket access introduced by the new Windows XP TCP/IP implentation (which has not caused the end of the world, best as I can tell,) and Windows Vista introduces another TCP/IP stack. All of these harken back to winsock.dll and winsock2.dll.
Then there's the TCP/IP stack within the Linux kernel, and found in most Unix implementations such as Solaris (/dev/tcp, /dev/udp, etc.)
We run into so many issues with vendors' TCP/IP stacks (like Windows XP SP2's half-open connection limitation,) why do third party vendors not create third-party TCP/IP stacks? Or do they?
Regardless of the thought process behind the curiosity, could we speculate on the viability? Would it be a potential segregation of the mainstream OS world, or could one vendor's better implementation take over?
I see potential for the server market where many system builders, administrators, and maintainers would like to tweak system performance and security as much as possible. Would TCP/IP outside of the operating system allow for such an approach? And would it be too much of a potential black-eye for OS vendors to ever allow?
