[Users] Announce: FreeS/WAN Project Ending

[Thomas Shaddack]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Justin wrote:
> > From: Claudia Schmeing <claudia at coldstream.ca>
> > Subject: [Users] Announce: FreeS/WAN Project Ending
> >
> > Dear FreeS/WAN community,
> >
> > After more than five years of active development, the FreeS/WAN
> > project will be coming to an end.
>
> Is anyone disappointed?

Yes.

> Is anyone surprised?

Mildly.

> FreeS/WAN garroted itself by refusing to take code contributions from
> people inside the U.S., out of fear that the BXA would retroactively
> change export policy and render those contributions poisonous.

Is there anybody with enough organizational/leadership skills to take over
the project, preferably located further away of the US influence than
Canada is? Export policies are relevant only when enforceable.

> FreeS/WAN made no serious attempt to integrate with the linux kernel's
> routing infrastructure, no doubt due in part to the first issue above.

That could be relieved, given developers and skilled leadership.

> FreeS/WAN configuration was, and probably still is, not very intuitive;
> diagnostics were and probably are similarly poor.

Again, this can be relieved, given the developers.

> Corporations, the major users of VPNs, usually use dedicated vpn boxes
> with support from a commercial VPN provider.  If any such providers base
> their VPN products on FreeS/WAN, it's probably heavily modified.

I maintain a small conglomerate of private and corporate networks. We use
FreeS/WAN quite extensively, with great success - in last 2 years we had
no drop-out caused by the crypto infrastructure fault. No attempt for
opportunistic crypto on the IP level, though, at least not yet.

It was a good project. Hope somebody picks up the torch and keeps it
burning, possibly even brighter.