While I am too far from the process to offer comment to the contents of the post below, the last paragraph of the post in some bizarre way did help crystallize a thought that I knew had been nagging in the back of my mind for months, perhaps as much of a year, but that I just could not quite bring to the foreground. FreeS/WAN occupies a position very rarely found in efficient markets, such as open source software. While the position is rarely encountered, it can nonetheless exist: I believe that FreeS/WAN is a natural monopoly. Natural monopolies are usually only found in extremely small markets. The economic textbook example is a power company on an island of 50 people. The market size is simply too small to sustain the overhead of two companies, no matter how efficient both companies may become. Therefore, the market doesn't attract competitors, even absent any regulatory market distortions. (Hence the "natural" in "natural monopoly" :-) But for whatever reasons, FreeS/WAN has been holding such a natural monopoly position in by far the largest market in which I have ever seen such a beast. I find this fascinating. I wonder if economists will some day study the case to determine what factors brought it about. [I presume somebody other than the FreeS/WAN project may have written a few lines of Linux open source IPSec code, but they aren't competitors in that market any more than a guy walking around with a charged car battery offering service would be a competitor to the power company in the island example]. --Lucky, who simply had to share this revelation. Back to writing Mixmaster remailer code. -----Original Message----- From: owner-cypherpunks@lne.com [mailto:owner-cypherpunks@lne.com] On Behalf Of Anonymous Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 7:54 PM To: cypherpunks@lne.com; cryptography@wasabisystems.com Subject: RE: FreeSWAN Release 1.93 ships! On Sunday 09 December 2001 07:32 pm, Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to> wrote:
The big question is: will FreeS/WAN latest release after some 4 or 5 years of development finally both compile and install cleanly on current versions of Red Hat Linux, FreeS/WAN's purported target platform?
The latest releases of both Suse and Mandrake are both able to install kernels with Freeswan already integrated. It's a little newer addition to Mandrake, so you may want to use Suse. Suse makes it easy to set up encrypted file systems and other nice features. The major problem that holds back the development of FreeS/WAN is with its management. [Management that cares more about sitting on its pulpit, than getting useful software into the hands of people.] Unless things have changed recently, they still won't accept contributions from the US. This makes no sense. GPG is shipping with every Linux distribution I know of, and the German's take contributions from the US. The primary kernel developers have been willing to integrate crypto into the kernel since the crypto regs were lowered. It's the policy of no US contributions that's holding back Linux IPSEC. IMHO: If Freeswan had never been created, an alternate, more mature implementation would already exist in the mainline Linux kernel. --Anonymous