Open question regarding the future of Visual Intrusion Analyzer

["Eric Knight" <eric () swordsoft com>]

Greetings Snort Users,

SwordSoft (me) is currently, uhm, re-evaluating the future of the Visual Intrusion Analyzer tool.  VIA has been a 
fabulous draw to our web site, but its reached the end of its life cycle.  It never successfully sold a copy, and I 
never really had a lot of hope that I'd be able to do much with it.

VIA was a proof of concept for a larger system (Visual Enterprise Security) and once VIA evolved a few levels in-shop, 
the "VIA Professional" just became integrated into VES.  Somewhere between point A and point B, I'm left with the 
question about what to do with the current VIA product.  Its fun, a lot of people like it (1,500 downloads so far..)

Due to some intellectual property issues the other SwordSoft folkies are worried about, I can't release the Fatum and 
Visual Core source code -- it powers Fatum, VIA, and VES so we've ruled out open-source.  Disabling the copy protection 
and making it completely free, that I can do.  The platform it was written on, MS Java, is also dying a quick death.

If I do make a release "1.1", I'll also throw in a few improvements I've recently made, such as removing the dependancy 
for Microsoft Office.  It has a new display engine for the icons, too -- and the Fatum Core has about a 250% speed 
increase and much better memory management, so VIA's present "incarnation" could be improved greatly with almost no 
effort and could scale about 10 times larger, at least.

Likewise, there is the VIA Pro that's been sitting here for a couple of months that's almost ready, development stopped 
when it was placed into VES.  Its MDI and fully event driven -- a fairly sweet interface but it'll take some cut and 
pasting and another bundling effort to get it ready if I'd use it to replace VIA Standard.

However, is this really of any use to anybody?  I have to say, from this end of the download-chain, very few people 
talk to me about VIA or if/how they use it, if it does or does not solve any problems, or even mention "it would be 
better if it did this"...  I don't mind seeing the extra web site hits, and don't mind distributing a program for free 
-- its just that I won't be able to continue development on a project that "the powers that be" don't consider helpful 
for anything except publicity.  

I'm open to ideas, I'm sure there's got to be better solutions than anything I'm thinking about.

Take care,

Eric Knight