Open source vs commercial security?

Like many of us on AO, I've mostly only have the opportunity/funds to work with open source security software or hardware (firewalls (pf), IDS (snort), Spamassassin, Squid/Dansguardian)...

I've been wondering how these compare against commercial products; for example, is "carefull" inpection of packets of "IPSes" really much diffrent than using snort on the firewall to kill states of suspicious packets?

Anyways, I'd be interested in hearing the (preferably unbiased!) opinons of people who have used both commercial and open source secuirty...


Ammo

I could drone on and on, but let me answer you like this. In our experience a fairly heavily layered approach works best. Real Security for us is defined as commercial-off-the-shelf products like a Cisco PIX or NAV, backed up by and heavily monitored with tools we can have complete control over which just about always means Open Source.

-- spurious

I'm also a fan of using both..

"best of both worlds"

for example my linux mail server scans the mails with f-secure (linux gateway edition)

I use all of it on my box ^_^. F-Secure, F-Prot and NAV, etc... I think they are both very good; helping protect from the others weakness even (like AwAware and S&D).

-Cheers-