Re: Price for "vanilla Snort" (no bells and whistles)

[Martin Roesch <roesch () sourcefire com>]

On 5/6/02 10:31 PM, "dr.kaos" <dr.kaos () kaos to> wrote:

> On Monday 06 May 2002 05:30 am, Glenn Larsson wrote:
>
> > The Snort license speaks of snort as free (as in sourcecode) and not
> > price; i'm wondering - is sourcefire the only current provider of a
> > commercial snort?
>
> Not exactly. Sourcefire is the only organization with a true 'commercial
> snort' in the sense that they've changed the code (and the license) to
> improve functionality and performance (if I understand right). To my
> knowledge, this is the only closed-source derivation of Snort to date.
> There are a few others, though, that make 'snort appliances' (hardware
> boxes with pre-configured snort, sometimes with custom management
> interfaces). Check out the CrunchBox at http://www.shopip.com and
> Silicon Defense's products at http://www.silicondefense.com

For the record, Sourcefire has put no proprietary mods into Snort at this
time, the version running on our sensors is the exact same version that you
can download for free at snort.org.  That's why the software has been
improving so much lately (from a features and stability standpoint), we need
it to be there for our commercial users and you get the benefits of that
work.  All the proprietary stuff that we do wraps around Snort and interacts
with it, but doesn't link directly into it (and therefore doesn't need to be
GPL'd itself).

> > What if i do not need the Management console or hardware or any
> > support that sourcefire provide, i just the packet driver and the IDS
> > engine.

Then you get to code the "everything else" that the commercial vendors
provide.  If you modify Snort in any way, the mods that you make should be
available upon request whether you're selling it as a service or a product,
I think this loophole is closed in the latest version of the GPL.


     -Marty


-- 
Martin Roesch - Founder/CEO, Sourcefire Inc. - (410)290-1616
Sourcefire: Professional Snort Sensor and Management Console appliances
roesch () sourcefire com - http://www.sourcefire.com
Snort: Open Source Network IDS - http://www.snort.org


_______________________________________________________________

Have big pipes? SourceForge.net is looking for download mirrors. We supply
the hardware. You get the recognition. Email Us: bandwidth () sourceforge net
_______________________________________________
Snort-users mailing list
Snort-users () lists sourceforge net
Go to this URL to change user options or unsubscribe:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/snort-users
Snort-users list archive:
http://www.geocrawler.com/redir-sf.php3?list=snort-users