Wow! I really opened a can of beans with my original post, "grenaded" the can would be more like it. :-) Anyway, lets seperate fact from opinion. FACT: 1) Contrary to rumor, there is no "backdoor" to Smoothwall. 2) In March of 2002 Richard Morrell of Smoothwall accused IPCop of violating the GPL with respect to Smoothwall's v0.9.9 distro. MY OPINION: I believe Richard Morrell. He would not have gone public with his accusation if he did not believe it. Since that time, IPCop may have mended their ways, I really don't know. BUT, I view their original actions as distasteful and therefore I will NOT support their distribution, nor will I recommend it to anyone I know. ANOTHER THOUGHT: Support contracts, for open source applications and operating systems, is what will drive open source into the business environment. This can be shown to be true by RedHat and SUSE's success. Both offer their product for free, but also provide support through contracts. Therefore I submit that if you place yourself in the role of a mid-level IT support person at a small to mid-size company and you try to implement an open source appliction or OS, the first question from the CTO and/or CIO will be, "Who will support this product when you leave the company?" Telling the CTO or CIO that they have to subscribe to a user group to get their questions answered will NOT cut it. On the other hand, telling them that the software provider you have chosen will provide support for a yearly fee will ease their minds. Therefore, I submit that SmoothWall.co.uk is a better choice for the business environment. IPCop is fine for "at home" use, if you so prefer, but to be quite honest, I wouldn't try to sell it to the upper management of a business. This is my last post on the subject, unless someone directs a question/comment directly at me. Let's face it folks. There are as many opinions about different distros of Linux as there are people on this list, and banging our fists on the table proclaiming one over the other will get us nowhere. Let's all just agree to disagree. -- Todd Young 7079 Dawn Ave. E. Inver Grove Heights, MN 55076 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list