Source for Software-Defined Networks: A Systems Approach is available on GitHub under terms of the Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. The community is invited to contribute corrections, improvements, updates, and new material under the same terms. While this license does not automatically grant the right to make derivative works, we are keen to discuss derivative works (such as translations) with interested parties. Please reach out to [email protected].

If you make use of this work, the attribution should include the following information:

This book is part of the Systems Approach Series, with an online version published at https://sdn.systemsapproach.org.

To track progress and receive notices about new versions, you can follow the project on Facebook and Mastodon. To read a running commentary on how the Internet is evolving, follow the Systems Approach on Substack.

We continually release open source content in GitHub, with print and ebook editions published from time-to-time. The latest print and ebook (2nd Printing) corresponds to the v2.0 tag.

In general, master contains a coherent and internally consistent version of the material. (If it were code, the book would build and run.) Minor fixes are checked directly into master, but new content under development is checked into branches until it can be merged into master without breaking self-consistency. The web version of the book available at https://sdn.systemsapproach.org is then continuously generated from master.

Minor releases (e.g., v1.1) are tagged whenever there is sufficient improvements or new content to warrant the effort. This is done primarily to create a snapshot so that everyone in a course can know they are using the same version.

To build a web-viewable version, you first need to download the source:

.. literalinclude:: code/build.sh

The build process is stored in the Makefile and requires Python be installed. The Makefile will create a virtualenv (venv-docs) which installs the documentation generation toolset. You may also need to install the enchant C library using your system’s package manager for the spelling checker to function properly.

To generate HTML in _build/html, run make html.

To check the formatting of the book, run make lint.

To check spelling, run make spelling. If there are additional words, names, or acronyms that are correctly spelled but not in the dictionary, please add them to the dict.txt file.

To see the other available output formats, run make.

We hope that if you use this material, you are also willing to contribute back to it. If you are new to open source, you might check out this How to Contribute to Open Source guide. Among other things, you’ll learn about posting Issues that you’d like to see addressed, and issuing Pull Requests to merge your improvements back into GitHub.

If you’d like to contribute and are looking for something that needs attention, see the wiki for the current TODO list.