Richard Morrell is back to FOSDEM This week's first interview is devoted to Richard Morrell. He will come to FOSDEM 2002 to present SmoothWall
and the evolutions since last year, as Richard was a speaker last year.
Raphaël Bauduin - Please present yourself.
Richard Morrell - Hello I am Richard Morrell, cofounder and CEO of SmoothWall, a popular
custom Linux distribution now finding homes worldwide in 107 countries and
14 languages. I also founded and am Operations Director of the corporate
arm of SmoothWall Ltd (www.smoothwall.co.uk), a company setup to maximise
revenue from our work - with real commercial revenue partners and paying
reseller partners in 9 countries including the USA, Canada, Australia, UK,
Germany and across Scandinavia.
This is my second year at FOSDEM, last year I presented keynotes and a talk
on SmoothWall as well as round tables with Jeremy Allison my
former VA colleague and Richard Stallman - and then I think RMS sang me
Happy Birthday with 400 other people in the auditorium on microphone - I
won't tell you how embarressed I was. If you're in two minds about going to
FOSDEM - GO ! Its great fun but you will learn a lot, bring a laptop, your
own patch lead and remember your camera and an open mind, I wholly
recommend it :)
RB - When, how and why did you start smoothwall ?
RM - I started SmoothWall with my development partner Lawrence Manning in Summer
2000, soon after leaving Linuxcare in San Francisco and joining VA Linux,
but very much as a hobby. I started SmoothWall because there was no custom
Linux distribution aimed at the Windows and Linux professional user and no
simplified fast way of securing my large home network. It also saved me
over $4000 in buying a hardware firewall to protect my home NFS, Samba and
Apache servers on my internal network - a system where a box tied down with
a standard RedHat/Debian build would have needed constant ipchain
maintenance and complex rules policies. I wanted a fast to install fit for
purpose distribution that I could at the time distribute via the GPL and
learn and benefit from peer review to add features and also to decrease
usage of proprietary Windows tools like Checkpoint Firewall 1 and hardware
solutions from Cisco and Watchguard which for too long had held the ENTIRE
IT community globally to ransom. It was time for a new kid on the block. I
wish I'd realised how much money I'd have to put up to do this but its been
worth becoming single and almost bankrupt (I think).
RB - Are there a lot of interaction with the user community ?
RM - SmoothWall WAS built very much in the GPL community and the GPL community
is very important to us. We have invested over $90,000 in 2 years out of
personal funds and donations to make SmoothWall grow and to become as
popular as it is now thanks to the GPL community, and a SmoothWall is
installed somewhere globally on average every six minutes recording back to
our HQ SQL servers important user information collated openly for us to be
able to monitor usage and features. SmoothWall was originally founded on
Sourceforge and vocally supported and championed by the likes of Chris Di
Bona, Jo Arruda and Larry Augustin at VA and supported behind the scenes by
Alan Cox, Dave Sifry and Art Tyde then of Linuxcare and a capable bunch of
people in the US who are now running their own cool project very much along
the lines of where we knew we couldnt go both ethically and financially.
SmoothWall is very much built on using the GPL as a testbed for tools and
also showing there is a need for free GOOD strong Security software backed
up by a commercial alternative like our Corporate Server.
SmoothWall is a European effort - we have a strong European Team, in
Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Holland, and across France and Spain. We've
never really adopted things like CVS or Bugzilla because of the need for
massive security - and also because of the need to control the rate of
release. Hence SmoothWall's reputation.
SmoothWall has delivered over 37m emails since October 2000 on its mailing
lists to around 1900 currently subscribed users - and currently the website
is one of the most visited Linux sites anywhere - something we're proud of
considering the rate of donations to support us is so very poor. On average
SmoothWall servers protect between 2-6 machines although we know for a fact
that SmoothWall servers are in use in heavy industry, ecommerce,
webhosting, data colo's and companies large and small. In fact SmoothWall
protects so many networks that its scary to see sometimes that the core of
the product is produced by five people, myself, Lawrence Manning, William
Anderson, Dan Goscomb and Daniel Cuthbert. Our support is very much GPL
based and headed up in Virginia USA by Rebecca Ward, supported entirely
using OpenSource tools and Internet Relay Chat. Renaud Larsen formally on
the staff at SmoothWall and VA is also to thank for PR and press
penetration and constant important advice. Renaud is also on the
organisation team at FOSDEM and a reason we're here to support Raphael and
the team.
RB - Smoothwall is based on the RedHat distribution. Can you explain us
> this choice ?
RM - This was sort of true - but not entirely on VA Linux 6.2.1/3 itself an
optimised version of RedHat 6.2 - this was in July 2000. It could have been
based on ANY version of GNU/Linux. Nowadays we use our OWN home rolled
secured
distribution with our own hand created kernels based on Linus kernels
passed through our own processes which go way above and beyond those used
by RedHat and even the NSA. You MUST bear in mind that SmoothWall has now
evolved through nine releases and now bears little relation apart from name
to the original project. Commercial SmoothWall which is dual licenced and
partly non GPL out of need for income stability and also consumer
confidence is even less like our first steps. RedHat is still in our eyes
the most successful Linux distribution in the Enterprise but there is
little if any common code save maybe SSH versions, Apache versions etc.
SmoothWall has no X servers or applications, no FTP ability no Telnet
clients etc - its more an embedded device creation tool.
RB - Do you have a lot of interaction with other Free Software projects ?
RM - We don't have anywhere near enough, but we do rely on other free tools
without which we would have no SmoothWall and probably be bust. The most
important one is of course XChat which via irc.smoothwall.org gives us a
robust communications network on our multiple located servers all over the
world. Then Lawrence and I have saved over $3000 since Feb 2001 using
OpenH323 to communicate instead of the phone and lately since the summer
the wonderful GnomeMeeting product created by Damien Sandras, he of the
FOSDEM tshirt :) GnomeMeeting is one of the best written and most exciting
collaborative tools ever released for GNU/Linux.
My very good friend Jo Cheek who like me is ex Microsoft and Linuxcare to
boot, is the founder and longterm project manager and now CEO of Redmond
Linux, whose Amethyst version I urge you to visit their site to buy and
support a very important departure in the community. While not adding
anything in functionality really to the community it extends importantly
into the NEW GNU/Linux userbase making adoption of OpenSource technologies
faster and also making life easier. Don't knock it - you may end up working
for this guy.
It is my intention over the next three months to really make touch and help
support the Portslave project managed by Russell Coker - and also to start
a new project NodeConnect which will take on where SmoothWall didnt go in
remote server management (not just of GNU/Linux boxes but
Solaris/NT/Novell/SCO
resources) using high level encryption and a modular system designed to
bolt into Tivoli, OpenView but without the need for the excessive licencing
costs and training needs. A real management suite designed to do real work -
we've even got the prototype to have secure VoIP server support realtime
to support resources meaning you can ship support in a box as an OEM. Its
something I talked to Larry Augustin at VA Linux about as long ago as last
year but now we have it working. Its very exciting and could really
represent a very profitable and exciting departure for Linux consultants to
find jobs in proper consulting roles away from their current roles. Its a
major departure and its good for Linux - a departure away from the current
OpenSource model but very very good for delivery of professional services
revenue built on OpenSource for the first time in 2 years. SGI and
Linuxcare tried and failed, SuSE didnt get it anywhere near right and
Caldera havent had the bodies on the ground to get this right, we have a
track record and a userbase that is only 30% Linux GPL based and 70%
Windows NT/9x based many of whom wouldnt have ever used Linux. Its
exciting, scary but profitable and thats where we understand the need to be
different.
Walk quietly, carry a big stick and don't be scared of breaking a few eggs
along the way, Linux is part of your toolkit, OpenSource is a way of
working that you need to understand before you adopt and embracing existing
technologies and realising that there are tools and operating systems for
every part of society and industry - no-one ever got fired for buying
Cisco, lets see if we can change that to no-one ever got hired for buying
tools that didnt do the job. 90% of people at last years OSDEM understood
networking and the need for Linux in their roles. This year I hope that the
ranks are swelled with people wanting to know how to work better and more
efficiently, SmoothWall, our partner community and ISP program worldwide
and my new baby projects all strive to deliver one thing, functionality and
fault tolerance built on FUD. Not the sort of FUD Microsoft would have you
believe exists in GNU/Linux and the OpenSource community.
F = FUNCTIONALITY U = UNDERSTANDING D = DETERMINATION
Lets hope that this new sort of FUD becomes a watchword for FOSDEM
attendees. Attend, enjoy and contribute - FOSDEM is possibly the only
important Free and Open Source conference you should attend - it's also the
one produced for the LEAST money - its no exaggeration that the same budget
Linuxcare used to spend on weekly pizzafests on a Friday could finance 2
FOSDEMs so vote with your pockets guys and donate now pre show. Its
important to show you care.
Discuss Richard's interview here.
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