> As far as FW1 being "superior" to IPFilter, I don't think it's a great > comparison. FW1 is targeted at Enterprise customers and > designed to make > Checkpoint lots of money. My understanding is that Darren > wrote IPFilter to > benefit the Internet community. If he wanted to build a > large commercial > organization and target enterprises with his firewall > product, I'm sure he > could. I can tell you from working at a Fortune 1000 company > that the more > you target the enterprise, the more you have to make things > easy to use and > the more bureaucracy and overhead is involved. Not that this > is bad, it all > depends on what you want. Perhaps Darren would rather concentrate on > enhancing IPFilter's core features as opposed to marketing > and building > pretty and easy to use GUIs... Apologies Darren if I'm > mis-speaking for > you.
On the contrary, I think IPFilter has come a really long way, and I think Mr. Reed is doing a great job at what he does. I watched and waited and observed the progress of IPFilter for several years before I actually decided to implement it; I do not regret my decision in the least, even though I admit I had my reservations at first. For a piece of open, free software, I belive IPFilter is a commercial class product, or could easily be grown into one. Even though GUI is not a necessity, it would be nice to someday see the work of Mr. Berthomier and Mr. Reed join into one easy to install integrated package. From my own experience, I believe that IPFilter, SSH and Isba+VLog make for a very scalable and powerful cluster-managed firewall solution. Perhaps it is not quite fair to compare CheckPoint's FW-1 or FW NG to IPFilter, but I think it's a credit to all the work Mr. Reed has done on IPFilter and all the functionality of his software, to be compared to an enterpise class product such as FW-1 or FW NG. Just my two cents on the whole saga.
