Re: Netfilter vs commercial

["John A. Sullivan III" <john.sullivan@nexusmgmt.com>]

On Mon, 2004-08-09 at 13:03, Antony Stone wrote:
> On Monday 09 August 2004 5:48 pm, Mike O wrote:
> 
> > John,
> >
> > Would you mind elaborating on your comment about Netfilter's stateful
> > engine being weaker than Checkpoint's? and how would the window tracking
> > patch make it more secure. We have checkpoint here and have ran into
> > problems, where checkpoint has limited us in the way we do things here and
> > I have always wanted to implement netfilter but couldn't because it's open
> > source.
> 
> Why couldn't you implement netfilter "because it's open source"?
> 
> Do you know someone who has a plausible argument saying that open source 
> software is lower quality or less secure than commercial closed-source 
> software (or is someone simply living under the illusion that if something 
> goes wrong with their FW-1 firewall, they can sue Check Point, haha) ?
> 
> I'm very interested in any meaningful rationale for saying "we won't use it 
> because it's open source".   I could understand if the argument was "we won't 
> use it because it doesn't meet our needs", but that's a different argument.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Antony.
The "sue" argument is, sadly, very powerful among those who do corporate
risk assessment :-(  (financial risk - not security risk)
-- 
John A. Sullivan III
Chief Technology Officer
Nexus Management
+1 207-985-7880
john.sullivan@nexusmgmt.com
---
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