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.'"

VPN

[LDoggg_]

Does this include the VPN client?

The last linux release from cisco's site is a year old and the kernel module doesn't compile against the 2.6.19 kernel. Just to get it to compile against 2.6.18 you had to fake a config.h in your kernel source include folder.

And we care because

[Watson Ladd]

The thing about NAC's is they don't offer any real security. You can't tell the difference between a corrupted host emulating a good one and a good one. All open sourcing is is just a way to avoid leaving foo^W customers in the lurch.

Re:Cisco's table scrap

[jcgf]

You see the same thing over and over, "toss the free software dogs a bone and buy some publicity" the suits think. The only company actually open sourcing anything worth while is Sun and maybe IBM to some extent.

Actually the program is pretty cool...

[Ho Kooshy Fly]

It shows you all the insane registry hacking programs do, overriding or overwriting of DLLs, in general just a lot of bad behavior you see in Windoze. It runs on every desktop where I work and will stop most trojans from installing due to stupid "Oh, lets click on virus.exe" and run it.

Even if they're not making money off it (no clue tbqh), it probably has some cool tidbits of code...

-Ho

Re:Cisco's table scrap

[cfvgcfvg]

Yes, but the table scraps from such a huge organization is pretty big. Can you imagine if all the companies in the world gave back to the people all the technology they never intended to sell again. We'd all eat like kings.

Re:And we care because

[jhfry]

We care because instead of taking a once useful and arguably well made software product and tossing it in the trash... they are instead opening it up for those who are interested.

We care because they are helping to set a precedent, one that I hope becomes the norm for tech and software companies, at end of life... open source!

We care because one of the benefits of open source, is that a particularly well written piece of code can be adapted for a different function while retaining most of what makes it 'good'. So NAC's are worthless to you... but what about that one really powerful function Cisco wrote that finds it's way into 3 other open source products that are NOT worthless to you.

Finally, were NAC's so bad that you would rather they just tossed the code in their recycle bin?