916
Zenarmor (Sensei) / Re: Sensei on OPNsense - Application based filtering
« on: October 26, 2018, 08:33:09 pm »
Hi @wordsmith,
Many thanks for taking the time and provide this valuable feedback. Now we become aware of a communication problem.
To clarify things:
As you’ve correctly pointed out, if there is any misunderstanding, it’s unintentional. Your comments shed a lot of light as to what needs to be adjusted in the messaging. We’ll be working on that.
Taking this chance, I’d like to give a little bit of background why we started with “open source firewalls”.
As Sensei team, we believe that we’ve created a powerful packet processing technology. We believe that better packet visibility means better decision making. Better decision making means better success rates in detecting malign traffic.
Sensei is the first of two products that we’re going to create for a large market.
We hope to make Sensei available for any network security equipment / product which needs application classification & web security features. L3-L4 firewalls, UTMs all fall into this category.
The thing we started with open source firewall space is that, it was a request by an MSP who was deploying open source firewalls onto customers and providing support services. Very happy with their current firewalls, they needed several features that we could provide. We quickly did an integration and voila! The resulting solution (OPNsense + Sensei) was found to be better than many of the current players in the UTM market.
This sparked a light for us. Why not deliver the product as a plugin instead of yet another full-blown firewall appliance? It’d be cost effective for us and we would than be able to relay this cost advantage for the benefit of our prospective users.
In this regard, open source firewalls is a delivery channel for us, though it’s not the complete target market. Via this initial channel, we learn very much from our users and improve Sensei. You can’t believe how much Sensei improved from the day we announced first beta up until this day. Then of course, we are looking for market visibility. It’s great to see people loving the solution and spreading the word.
A free of charge Sensei edition (maybe we should call this freemium edition) is a way of our giving back to the OPNsense community.
Having founded a local open source community (enderunix.org) and published some open source tools, I truly understand, appreciate and respect your stance.
Though we cannot make Sensei fully open source, I think the best we can do right now is to communicate what Sensei is and what it is not in a straight and open way. This way people would know what they will have and what they won’t; and will make an informed decision about using / not using it.
It's somewhat hard to figure out a way to communicate people that the current product is for “open source firewalls” without using the words “open source”. Because marketing wise, we would like to be as precise as possible so that people would know what it is for.
However I also see that it’s creating confusion. We’ll spend more time on this. I’d also like to consult you if you wouldn’t mind.
Again, many thanks for bringing this up to our attention.
Many thanks for taking the time and provide this valuable feedback. Now we become aware of a communication problem.
To clarify things:
- Either Community or Enterprise Edition, Sensei core packet engine is not open source. Speaking of today, there are no plans to make it open source. We’re like Oracle running on Linux.
- Community Edition (or may be we should call it freemium edition) is and will be free of charge for the open source community. - Free as in “free beer”
As you’ve correctly pointed out, if there is any misunderstanding, it’s unintentional. Your comments shed a lot of light as to what needs to be adjusted in the messaging. We’ll be working on that.
Taking this chance, I’d like to give a little bit of background why we started with “open source firewalls”.
As Sensei team, we believe that we’ve created a powerful packet processing technology. We believe that better packet visibility means better decision making. Better decision making means better success rates in detecting malign traffic.
Sensei is the first of two products that we’re going to create for a large market.
We hope to make Sensei available for any network security equipment / product which needs application classification & web security features. L3-L4 firewalls, UTMs all fall into this category.
The thing we started with open source firewall space is that, it was a request by an MSP who was deploying open source firewalls onto customers and providing support services. Very happy with their current firewalls, they needed several features that we could provide. We quickly did an integration and voila! The resulting solution (OPNsense + Sensei) was found to be better than many of the current players in the UTM market.
This sparked a light for us. Why not deliver the product as a plugin instead of yet another full-blown firewall appliance? It’d be cost effective for us and we would than be able to relay this cost advantage for the benefit of our prospective users.
In this regard, open source firewalls is a delivery channel for us, though it’s not the complete target market. Via this initial channel, we learn very much from our users and improve Sensei. You can’t believe how much Sensei improved from the day we announced first beta up until this day. Then of course, we are looking for market visibility. It’s great to see people loving the solution and spreading the word.
A free of charge Sensei edition (maybe we should call this freemium edition) is a way of our giving back to the OPNsense community.
Having founded a local open source community (enderunix.org) and published some open source tools, I truly understand, appreciate and respect your stance.
Though we cannot make Sensei fully open source, I think the best we can do right now is to communicate what Sensei is and what it is not in a straight and open way. This way people would know what they will have and what they won’t; and will make an informed decision about using / not using it.
It's somewhat hard to figure out a way to communicate people that the current product is for “open source firewalls” without using the words “open source”. Because marketing wise, we would like to be as precise as possible so that people would know what it is for.
However I also see that it’s creating confusion. We’ll spend more time on this. I’d also like to consult you if you wouldn’t mind.
Again, many thanks for bringing this up to our attention.