FW: FreeSWAN Release 1.93 ships!

Lucky Green shamrock at cypherpunks.to
Mon Dec 10 20:53:19 PST 2001


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 at lne.com [mailto:owner-cypherpunks at lne.com] On
Behalf Of Anonymous
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 7:54 PM
To: cypherpunks at lne.com; cryptography at wasabisystems.com
Subject: RE: FreeSWAN Release 1.93 ships!


On Sunday 09 December 2001 07:32 pm, Lucky Green
<shamrock at 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





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