On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 06:07:59PM +0000, SPB wrote: > On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Solar Designer wrote: > > SD! Michael Tokarev's avcheck isn't out of consideration for Owl, too, > SD! although I'm not sure of how much use it would be if we don't also > SD! package an anti-virus (which is hardly the right thing to do, for both > SD! licensing and technical reasons... well, maybe in some commercial > SD! build of Owl if such a thing is ever born). > I think in order for this to happen, you need to consider breaking > Owl, into a commercial and a research version, they way NFR was > back about '99. i.e., a research version for the hackers, and a > corporate version for the suits. I've been using NFR at the time. I don't think it should be exactly the same for Owl because the NFR 2.0.x research version was actually only licensed for research. I wouldn't want to restrict commercial use of the free branch of Owl (and I am not sure this is even possible legally considering the amount of GPL'ed software we include). > One way you could possibly do this is to encourage drop in functionality, > i.e. an addin IDS box, GW firewall, mail server, etc.... Yes, this is what I am considering. However, I would really not want to directly compete with other projects, in particular EnGarde. It means that instead of making a commercial version for the suits as you say, we may make commercial add-ons which are of most use at corporate and ISP networks still run by hackers who will influence their management into making the purchases. > It's a pain > trying to raise money from commercial ventures, and it's gonna be an > uphill struggle to make money out of Owl. There's no intent to make much money out of Owl, but rather just enough to have it (the free version) evolve the way I'd like it to. > The most annoying thing is seeing how useful Owl can really be, but > until we can convince people that a full install of Mandrake, Red Hat, > etc does not a secure server make, money will be hard to come by... I think it's additional functionality + security and not security alone which may bring money. > Just my random scriblings... Thanks, it helps to see what others are thinking. -- /sd
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Sun Jan 15 2006 - 13:43:18 PST