That is, vendors who embrace it and are public about it. The rest run scared and won't admit when then do use it. And far too many use it and won't admit it for fear that customers learn and see through the expensive prices paid for appliances driven by open source with a "nice gui".
Dana Blankenhorn and Howard Anderson recently shared their views on open source, that it is a great equalizer in the market (my summation.) There are many things in their posts I agree with, and some I definitely don't (open source is not a religion, btw.) Open source changes the playing field. If users have a free, open source alternative, commercial products have to work harder to justify their prices and be competitive.
Open source gives users an immediate solution to their problems, whether that be an IPS, router, VPN, firewall, web server or any number of network services. Developers can take things further by extending, fixing, enhancing or just plain understanding what the source code does.
Of course my examples of open source changing the game come back to Cobia. If you just bought a firewall or a router, you likely wasted your money. Could have had a V8, eh? Yes, could have downloaded Cobia instead of paying more dollars to proprietary appliance vendors (who may have just sold you a good bit of open source packaged on a hardware appliance.)
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