A new breakthrough in the open-source art Security Market

Article title: a new breakthrough in the open-source Art security market. Linux is a technology channel of the IT lab in China. Includes basic categories such as desktop applications, Linux system management, kernel research, embedded systems, and open source.

On the road to solving people's needs, the technology world often creates a chaotic situation without the cohesion needed to solve the problem. However, an open-source team has been trying to focus on user needs and other issues since the very beginning. As we all know, open-source developers have always wanted to do their best to solve user problems. they have invested a lot in developing powerful functions, it also provides richer and more secure code to help solve user problems.

However, open-source products may also have disadvantages. for example, the code manufactured by open-source developers tends to meet the design needs of their developers, and it is difficult for common users to use the code. "We have such a team that can do incredible work, but they have not considered the problem from the perspective of users, "Untangle is one of the companies that integrate open source technology into their products," said Andrew MegaE, product manager and principal manager of the Silicon Valley Linux User Group.

From the programmer's point of view, there is no need to set up an interface suitable for the user, because the programmer can directly use the code for work, splice all the required code and make appropriate adjustments to keep the remaining code. Caffe compares the work of programmers with the work of a carpenter's shop. every corner of the carpenter's shop is filled with the beautiful components required by a project, but only one carpenter knows how to assemble these scattered components into a useful whole. The beauty of open source is that any Carpenter can access a carpenter's shop and use scattered components to create new and different things. With the creative input and constant innovation of programmers, open-source technologies can be continuously improved.

However, not all users have superb technology, time, or hobbies to be such a carpenter or programmer. "Everyone loves beautiful things, however, each person has a different understanding of beauty, "Fife pointed out.

For developers, beauty may mean code writing or code running, but for common users, the visual beauty or interactive application of a program is more important. "In this era, users do not need to know the compiler or the specific source code. they just want to click the mouse or simple command to help them install any program, "said Tomasz Kojm, project chief technology officer of Sourcefire's open-source mail engine ClamAV.

How does open source change the technology market?

Morris said that small enterprises do not care about the technology itself, as long as the technology can play its important role, and the use is convenient and cheap, it is what they need. If the company spends a lot of resources to increase the efficiency of a mail engine that has reached 95% to 98%, we think this is definitely a waste of resources. "We need to make what they need, not the technology itself," Morris said.

Morris says small businesses are not suitable for their technical applications, but he also pointed out that the development of the technology market also needs to be promoted by sales force. "We can see that the small and medium-sized enterprise market is huge, but this market is difficult to develop," he said. "They are not interested in acquiring technology ."

More and more dealers are turning to small enterprise markets because they find it increasingly difficult to develop enterprise-level markets.

With the continuous improvement of open source, enterprise users gradually choose open code instead of dedicated solution products, because they can edit their own open code and use their internal expertise to customize their own open source code. Some open-source solutions are well known because they are more comparable and even superior than the corresponding dedicated solutions, such as Apache, Linux, and Firefox.

"A decade ago, everyone was building their own technology," says Dirk Morris, chief technology officer of Untangle. "Now, the value of open source is even more obvious, open source is about delivering and providing technology, rather than developing a technology."

Open-source technology brings convenience to many companies. open-source technology allows some companies to use existing technologies and build stronger technologies in the original technology. by strengthening the design and interface of the technology, this makes the products they produce more convenient and attractive for end users. The open-source community has begun to focus more on user interfaces and other issues.

"Apart from the common idea, most open-source applications are very easy to install and use," Kojm said. "after installation, common users can enable anti-virus software scanning and enable ClamAV within five minutes, and it is free of charge."

However, when using open-source software, user interfaces are not necessarily the most difficult issues. Javase said that it may take several days to configure open-source solutions, although the installation process is relatively simple. He pointed out that, especially for SNORT, it is a powerful open-source intrusion detection service (IDS), which requires a lot of debugging. On the first day after installation, the service may treat 10000 emails as spam, but these are all false positives. He said that fine-tuning the product would take four days.

When these problems eventually develop to require contractors to do the work, or purchase products with all functions (both spam and spam Web pages can be taken into consideration and intrusion detection services can be provided ), you may need to purchase and use a proprietary product.

Another reason for choosing a proprietary solution may be the security issue itself, says Joseph Feiman, analyst at Gartner. We all know that open-source products are provided for free, which means that hackers can try and test open-source products like legitimate companies. The code of those proprietary products has been tested and modified, and it is difficult for hackers to exploit it.

Feiman said that many open-source tools are not mature enough to provide powerful functions for deployment. For effective security tools, he said some network security tools, such as the network security tools used by Untangle, may be the strongest security tools. Network security is the most mature part in the security industry. In contrast, application software security is a new immature security tool, said Feiman.

Morris agrees that many open-source engine technologies are not yet mature or well-developed. Normally, his team will add some missing features to their open-source repositories, including ClamAV and Snort.

Some newer open-source software still needs to be developed, including junk mail assessment tools, Web filters, and ssl vpn (Secure Sockets Layer virtual private network), Morris said. Untangle has built these open-source software into the open-source warehouse, which is of great help to the improvement of the open-source community, he added.

Interdependent communities with inconsistent attitudes

Because of the joint development of enterprises and open-source communities, they naturally have some opinions on each other. He noted that many developers are skeptical about the motives of companies that use the results of their efforts. when he started to participate in user groups, he said developers would make fun of him, "They have a very cold attitude towards those who are not as technical as they are," he said.

There is a reason for this attitude. when a marketing or sales person appears in front of them, he says, "they become very rude ."

As he continues to return some effective results, developers in the open-source community began to respect him, he said. To some extent, he believes that the developer's attitude is changed because Untangle makes a clear commitment to continue to support open-source communities.

Tomasz said that as long as open-source authorization is respected and recognized, developers will agree that commercial users use the software they developed, "even from a legal perspective, they must agree, "Fife said.

He added that companies that benefit from open-source technologies should also return the open-source community in some way, "the return can be money, hardware, engineering and technical support," he said, "Open-source communities welcome this kind of reward and make developers happy."