OpenVPN

February 18, 2010
filed under genevainformation
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Among the most useful open source projects (besides OpenNMS, obviously, and RT) is OpenVPN. OpenVPN provides Virtual Private Networks (that’s the VPN), alas secures connections between Servers over unsecure networks (that’s the internet, for example).

OpenVPN is simple. You can start with little effort and accomplish a good level of security straight away from the start. And when you become more complicated, OpenVPN has no barriers imposed – it simply does its job (I see a major role for OpenVPN in constructing Internet 2, but that’s another topic). It’s as well simple from an administrators point of view – the configuration
is straightforward (and not a pain in the butt like IPSec), and in the end you have an interface.
Having an interface for the VPN makes things like routing and firewalling very simple – whatever you have learned about routing or firewalling on Unix applies to the VPN as well. Can’t be much easier.

OpenVPN is as well Open Source Software, fully GPL’d, included or available in all major distributions.

A few years ago, James Yonan, the initiator and programmer of OpenVPN founded a company, probably to satisfy his need to eat regularily. Now the interesting question on companies in Open Source is – where’s the business model?

Tarus bashes regularily the “fauxpen” source-approach where you get a free, but cut-down version for no money but need to pay big bucks for “the real” software.

OpenVPN seems to go a different way: The basis is GPL’ed, free, under development. What they did is to develop an Administration Server which facilitates all the things you need to do to manage a population of VPN-Users. The per user fee is at 5 USD per year per concurrent user, which is well below the market price charged by the competitors.

This fee represents easily the added value – in fact, doing the stuff the server does for you manually would require much more time than the equivalent of 5$.

So there’s a product worth paying for, and it’s based on OpenVPN. Nothing prevents anybody, by the way, to develop a similar product and use OpenVPN as the basis.

I have been using OpenVPN in a commercial context before, and it did safe the company a good amount of money – but as opposed to other tools which did the same, we never got to actually pay or contribute to OpenVPN (I still feel bad about that one). The Server would have been of interest to us (we did develop the functionality ourselves in the end, VPNs were deployed
with a few clicks), but we spent more inernal effort on that than the five bucks per user, that’s for sure.

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