Cisco to Open Source CTA

VE3OGG writes "Cisco, the networking Goliath, has decided to release the source code of its NAC (network admission control) client, Cisco Trust Agent (CTA) to the open source community within 'a few months.' This comes hot on the heels of Cisco announcing its plans to redevelop a new breed of network security infrastructure. 'CTA will be something that's open source. That's just logically where it should end up,' Gleichauf told InfoWorld. 'We don't want to be in the CTA business, so we're going to just open it up.'"

Cisco's table scrap

[Lead Butthead]

We don't want to be in the CTA business, so we're going to just open it up.

Translation :- "Here's something we either can't milk money out of or we're planning to discard altogether, knock yourselves out."

Gift horse

[forand]

Do you really think that they should be giving you their hard work for free? I would love to have companies which abandon or otherwise stop supporting a product give it to the open source community instead of having it lost forever. Just because you find the product they are going to release beyond use does not mean that it is useless to us all.

Re:And we care because

[gclef]

NAC isn't really about preventive security, no matter how it's billed...it's sold as a security tool because that's the only way to get the bosses to understand that real security comes from being *organized* and consistent all the way down to the patch levels on *every* *host*. NAC doesn't fix broken machines...it does help you keep organized about what your non-broken machines look like, so that you minimize the number of broken ones.