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Bob Walters, with more than 15 years of experience in security-software company executive management, joined two-year-old Metavize shortly before New Year’s 2007. Since then he has revamped its business model. He has put more emphasis on software than hardware in providing gateway security. He is increasing coverage outside the U.S. And because the Metavize framework already made extensive use of open source software (OSS), on June 26 he made the framework itself OSS.

Walters’ version of OSS falls into the hybrid category under debate within the Open Solutions Initiative (OSI) community. The OSI contention is that you can't tangle up OSS and proprietary software and still call it OSS, even if it's free. True OSS has to be distributable and of course open source. But Walters software doesn’t look to me like the freeware that many companies are beginning to pass off as OSS. About 85% of the software is free and distributable under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2). [As with many industry participants, Walters is taking a wait-and-see attitude on GPL Version 3.]

Under both GPLs, community members are free to use most of the technology to use, modify and even distribute. Specifically all the software in the Gateway Platform, including applications like Web Filtering, Spam Blocking, Spyware and Virus Blocking, and VPN is included. Active directory integration, advanced policy management and configuration backup are still “closed.” And the company appears to be giving back to the community, or at least trying to. It added full blown quarantine to Spamassassin but the Spamassassin community declined to take it into its distro. That enhancement will become OSS via Untangle.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the company name also changed to Untangle (I’m not sure if that decision was made before Walters joined; the two items were announced on the same day). But not everything changed. Walters has kept the emphasis (1) on small and medium businesses (SMB) and (2) on delivering the Metavize/Untangle threat management software functionality as a service (SaaS). If you’re not familiar with the space (as I wasn’t), Untangle does for servers and gateways what MacAfee, Symantec, etc. do for desktops, giving SMB firms the advantage of not having to rely on blocking threats at the last threat point, the desktop.

Untangle says that IDC calculates that revenue for “threat management devices” total over $3B annual today and are growing at 16% per year. The market has been dominated by the appliance vendors, according to Untangle, with OSS security products relegated to point solution status.

The Untangle Gateway Platform is available on SourceForge. Remember the product can be used to manage threats against any software, not just OSS. And you may be using it already under another name because much of Untangle’s distribution is through third party service providers that change the name.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Business Issue |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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