well, since Richard Morell has left Smoothwall now, things have become much nicer again. Originally, they didn't even want to do another version of their GPLed Smoothwall... I'm quite happy they changed their mind. Although I miss the rude way that Richard used to treat his customers and fellow developers on the mailing lists...;)
because it's easy to set up on a bit of spare hardware, however old it may be? Because it provides all that the average firewall user needs? Because it is easy to maintain once it's running? Because most hardware firewalls are as unflexible as they are expensive? I can think of a lot of reasons. In my company, a number of offices use Smoothwall and will certainly upgrade to Smoothwall Express soon, simply because it's an affordable way to secure our network boundaries and because the ongoing maintenance work is minimal.
I sometimes wonder if people bother to read the license they want to talk about. The GPL clearly states that if you want to distribute binaries (which is what those companies do), you are only allowed to do so if you (and that's you, not someone else like kernel.org) makes the source code available, including any modifications you may have made. That's not making it overly hard on anyone who wants to use it - besides, they use something they don't have to pay for, so the least the developers of the linux kernel can expect is that people who use it comply with the license.
well, on the first page the author already makes it pretty obvious why SpamAssassin had to come out at the bottom of the list. He is comparing version 2.44, which was included in RH9 and is thus at least 8 months old, to the latest antispam software that is regularly updated. How on earth is that an unbiased comparison? In a world where spam patters change every week, if not every day, 8 months is a generation... he even says so in his article. I'd be interested to see the results of a similar test, but with SpamAssassin 2.60 and of course with bayesian filtering and some of the other optional features enabled...
thing is, after Fedora Core update support ends, the Fedora Legacy team takes over and continues to provide updates for a longer period of time. By the way, they will also provide up2date-enabled repositories for RH 7.3, 8 and 9 when official update support for those ends.
If you are more interested in the possibilities of using pox viruses as biological weapons, I recommend Richard Preston's "The Demon in the Freezer". Excellent book, also has some background on the earlier IL-4 experiments with mouse pox.
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well, since Richard Morell has left Smoothwall now, things have become much nicer again. Originally, they didn't even want to do another version of their GPLed Smoothwall... I'm quite happy they changed their mind. Although I miss the rude way that Richard used to treat his customers and fellow developers on the mailing lists... ;)
because it's easy to set up on a bit of spare hardware, however old it may be? Because it provides all that the average firewall user needs? Because it is easy to maintain once it's running? Because most hardware firewalls are as unflexible as they are expensive? I can think of a lot of reasons. In my company, a number of offices use Smoothwall and will certainly upgrade to Smoothwall Express soon, simply because it's an affordable way to secure our network boundaries and because the ongoing maintenance work is minimal.
I sometimes wonder if people bother to read the license they want to talk about. The GPL clearly states that if you want to distribute binaries (which is what those companies do), you are only allowed to do so if you (and that's you, not someone else like kernel.org) makes the source code available, including any modifications you may have made. That's not making it overly hard on anyone who wants to use it - besides, they use something they don't have to pay for, so the least the developers of the linux kernel can expect is that people who use it comply with the license.
well, on the first page the author already makes it pretty obvious why SpamAssassin had to come out at the bottom of the list. He is comparing version 2.44, which was included in RH9 and is thus at least 8 months old, to the latest antispam software that is regularly updated. How on earth is that an unbiased comparison? In a world where spam patters change every week, if not every day, 8 months is a generation... he even says so in his article. I'd be interested to see the results of a similar test, but with SpamAssassin 2.60 and of course with bayesian filtering and some of the other optional features enabled...
thing is, after Fedora Core update support ends, the Fedora Legacy team takes over and continues to provide updates for a longer period of time. By the way, they will also provide up2date-enabled repositories for RH 7.3, 8 and 9 when official update support for those ends.
If you are more interested in the possibilities of using pox viruses as biological weapons, I recommend Richard Preston's "The Demon in the Freezer". Excellent book, also has some background on the earlier IL-4 experiments with mouse pox.