CheckPoint Acquires Sourcefire
October 11, 2005 Leave a comment
The money sure was flowing while I was in the UK, wasn't it? By acquiring Sourcefire, CheckPoint gets the Open Source Snort IDS along with Marty Roesch and a ton of other expertise. In a letter from Marty, he states: “I’ll start by stating again what I’ve stated in the past, Snort is now and will continue to be free to end-users.”. What definition of free that is remains to be seen, but I've dealt with CheckPoint long enough to know their sole motivation is money. Marty has been a really stand up guy and Sourcefire has been a model company in the Open Source world, IMHO. They made money, but still usually did the right thing. I hope this trend continues while under the thumb of CP, but I have my doubts. If nothing else, Open Source in the business world is certainly being legitimized. Should be an interesting OSBC next month (which , incidentally, LQ is a sponsor of).
Snort, Sourcefire, Open Source, IDS, CheckPoint
–jeremy