Marty Roesch is the one that has been keeping it in the open source community and since Checkpoint is totally commercial and paid $225 million for it, how long will it be before they close it. Look at RedHat and other flavors of Linux and now Nessus too.

They do say that they will keep it open source but I am wondering how long will it take for some number cruncher or new CEO or other officer convinces them otherwise.

Everyone who uses snort knows when sourcefire was created we were told nothing was going to change the open source part of snort. Since then though, the signature part did change and to get the super duper version of snort sigs you have to subscribe/pay for them. Grant it we can write and do our own sigs, but losing the community effort would be a great loss. I don't blame them for trying to make money, it is how they stay alive. I've just been using snort for so long, I'll hate it when it will no longer be freely available.

I'm just biding the time until it happens, hopefully, when and if it does occur, the open community can take the last GPL version and fork it to another open source IDS project.