[Gllug] Opinions on Smoothwall and other firewalls

[Bruce Richardson]

On 10/5/01, 10:12:22 AM, Peter Chauncy <Peter.Chauncy at PoplarHarca.co.uk> 
wrote regarding [Gllug] Opinions on Smoothwall and other firewalls:

> I am looking for a firewall to sit between a  2Mbit leased line and a
> network of about 80 odd PCs.  I just discovered Smoothwall
> http://www.smoothwall.org from a search on Google and it seems really
> interesting.  Does anyone have any experience with it, and resultant
> opinions ?  What are the alternatives ? From my reading of the
> documentation, smoothwall's big advantage over alternatives is its ease 
of
> use.

Smoothwall has caused a lot of excitement on uk.comp.os.linux.  Not 
because of the quality of the product - serious doubts have been raised 
about its security - but because of the antics of the development team.  
The lead developer is mentally unstable and childishly abusive.  They 
recently tried to mess with the license in a way that would have broken 
the GPL and violated the license terms of much of the open source code it 
is based on.  They refused for some time to release the code of the 
latest version - in violation of the GPL.  When challenged on these 
violations they lied, on Usenet and on their website.  The support 
community is craven and passive because of the behaviour of Richard 
Morrell (the above-mentioned nutter), who is apt to shout, scream and ban 
people at random.  The rest of the development team are more normal but 
persist in a) denying any violation of the GPL b) pretending that Richard 
Morrell is a sane and reasonable human being and c) insisting that black 
is white if the alternative is a bollocking from Richard.

Whatever the actual quality of the code (something which their behaviour 
has made difficult to assess), the quality of the support (and support 
community) is a vital component of an open source product like 
Smoothwall.

-- 

Bruce

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