System Administration

Left Out in the Cold

Network Associates dissolved their PGP business unit, and has decided to stop selling some of the product line.

I've long thought that NAI was confused, from the initial merger of McAfee and Network General on through the acquisitions of TIS and PGP, Inc. Not because the combination of their product lines into a more general security company was a bad idea, but because the lines became redundant, the product names inexplicable, and the choices overwhelming — almost as if someone at Computer Associates were running the show.

I don't mind the dissolution of the business unit so much, or the loss of the PGP Desktop offering, since there are open alternatives. What bothers me is the loss of Gauntlet. Gauntlet is an excellent implementation of an application-proxy firewall, succeeding the FWTK. (BTW, NAI has a side-by-side comparison of link rot here.) Source code was available to Gauntlet customers, though I don't know how much that changed since last I asked for it. Instead of hoarding the Gauntlet and the other discontinued PGP products, NAI should free the code. If you're not going to use it, why not let others?

UPDATE 15-March-2002: NAI updated their website. It looks like Secure Computing bought the Gauntlet assets. So it won't be dead and gone. PGP, Inc., did provide other services to PGP users, though, such as the keyserver, the LDAP schema for which wasn't documented except in the source.

4:58:24 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Security, System Administration