Tiny Firewall "Abandoned by TinySoftware & CA"?

Since a lot of people here use Tiny, but dont participate at it's official forums, I have decided to pretty much copy a post from the official forums done by "CVSCorp" in an effort to get popular opinion here at Wilders. Here is his original post(http://www.tinysoftware.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2206):

" Abandoned by TinySoftware & CA

In June 2005, Computer Associates purchased Tiny Software and all their firewall products, but left us (former TPF users) hanging out by the roadside, with no further support, upgrades or forum support from CA or Tiny Software.

I have been using these products for some twelve years, and have watched Tiny Software sell them off to companies like Kerio, Winroute and now CA.

This is what we got for our loyalty to product. At this point, it looks like CA has torn the TPF firewall apart, and now markets what we have for $99.00, to the high end server market, or government clients, for thousands of dollars. I have not found a CA firewall product with comparable features, or an upgrade to TPF from CA, for TPF's "former users".

Just about the time when Tiny Software released it's HSS product, a product well written and easily configurable by the home or SOHO market, the company was sold to CA, and apparently, HSS development, or improvement for the SOHO market is at a stand still with no plans to continue it's development, improvement or use.

That is truly a shame. It seems whenever a truly good firewall hits the market, at a reasonable price, someone will take it off the market, and leave the average user to fend for themselves, in an ever increasingly threatening world.

One of TPF's most impressive features, the "Import" of Snort Rules, and the "Import Tool" itself, has been taken out of the former TPF product base by CA. I have found that if you install TPF v6.0.140, configure the IDS/IPS Snort Rule Set, and then take a copy of it's IDS.xml file, and install TPF 2005. You can then drop this IDS.xml file in the PolicyTable\10\srv directory of TPF2005, and it will work after rebooting the system. Beyond this, the "SnortImp.exe" Tool, will not work on the Snort Rule .conf file to import a current rule set.

I think CA has intentionally dropped support for this aspect of the TPF class of firewalls.

To Roman Kasan and his team. If you’re reading this, money does make the world go round, and I'm happy you were rewarded for your work, but Dude, the world needs you, your firewall and your coding abilities, at least for the common and defenseless end user. You should reconsider your future objectives. We need you.

And beyond this, CA needs to get off their asses and provide both support and updates, with full product compatibility, on scale and balance with former TPF products, to Tiny's former product users.

Sincerely
Bill Ritchie"

What do you think?

 

Re: "Abandoned by TinySoftware & CA"

all ca might do is offer you etrust firewall for your tiny firewall license if its still valid

 

Silence towards customers usually indicates that they have little or no interrest in getting new customers imo.
But isnt this software so good that it will last atleast until (if) one migrates to Vista?

 

Acquisition and the following reorganization usaually take long time (half year to one year at least). CA has many products out there. TPF is only one of them, possibly with low priority. TPF 2005 is good enough that it is reasonable for CA to launch TPF 2006/2007 even at the end of this year.

 

So far I have had to manually update Tiny's rules to catch some new leaktests, but it is still able. There is only one leaktest i'm unsure of how to stop with Tiny, which is the SendMessage API test (breakout for IE and FF).