2001.12_Richard Morrell and Smoothwall Interview.pdf

INTERVIEW

SMOOTHWALL

Linux Magazine What is SmoothWall?

Richard Morrell SmoothWall is a specialist version of

Linux, which has been carefully designed, secured

and optimised in order to provide a network with all

the functionality of a secure router and firewall, but

at a fraction of the normal cost.

It started out as a personal project. I didn’t want

to, and couldn’t afford to, buy a watchguard box

(£1600 – £1800). That’s a lot of money and I have a

young family so couldn’t afford it. I was involved with

user groups in the Bay area and Silicon Valley, where I

was working with VA. I also discovered a young chap

called Lawrence Manning and we spent more and

more time together. In the end what we wanted to

do was try and do the development all by the Web.

It all sort of snowballed from there, we said,

hmmm this works, maybe we can elaborate on this

and see if anyone else is interested. We decided that

maybe we could make it into a project, because at

the time I was involved in deploying Sourceforge in

the US. It was really quite an exciting time to be part

of VA Linux. There was plenty of money about, plenty

of bandwidth and maybe some of that excitement

rubbed off and we came up with SmoothWall. From

there we came up with a logo and decided that if we

were going to do this properly as a project that we

should come up with a brand before we came up

with the product. With properly designed logos,

proper domain names, proper architecture, we were

ready to roll, should the project ever to take off.

SmoothWall was available on July 15 2000, on

Sourceforge initially, and I still remember the first 16

people to download it. It then grew from there, after

the first three or four weeks we had four and a half

thousand users and I thought that I was completely

out of my depth. At this point, I was spending a lot

of my work time with SmoothWall.

A lot of VA corporate customers in the UK started

to use it. That was because VA would send me to

customers and they would end up talking about

SmoothWall instead of VA. Then it appeared on Linux

Magazine in the States and in Linux Journal. All the

big magazines carried it as a coverdisc and we got

prime billing because at the time there wasn’t a huge

amount of stuff going on in the UK. We were the

only Linux project in Britain going apart from woffle.

As we started growing we began using more and

more bandwidth, and costs started increasing. I’ve

had to put the best part of £35,000 in just to keep it

afloat, which is a lot of money when you have a

young family. Unfortunately, open source doesn’t pay

the bills and geeks expect stuff for nothing. If you try

and turn commercial, then they attack you and

they’ve attacked my like I’ve never been attacked

before. I’ve received nasty mail, and even my son has

suffered part of a death threat: some guy in America

threatened to burn my house down, and told my son

that. This is all because I want to take part of the

project and make it non-GPL because part of it will

use non-GPL code that we couldn’t GPL even if we

wanted to.

The Linux community is full of wonderful people,

but it also has its fare share of morons who haven’t

got a clue. They sit in their bedrooms developing

code and think that anything that involves a GUI or a

browser is not suitable for public consumption. They

take the GPL to its extreme and I know most of the

Linux luminaries because of my time at LinuxCare and

VA. I’ve been around long enough, I am

Richard@linux.com. One of the biggest voices we

have is Alan Cox, and if I have a problem with

SmoothWall at one o’clock in the morning and I need

kernel advice I know I can phone up Ted Searle, or

anyone, and get advice.

There aren’t many other projects that have the

breadth of friends that we do. If I need bandwidth or

testing I phone up Larry Augustine and it happens.

Last night we were working on licensing issues and it

was Chris di Bona and Joe Ruiner and you can’t get

much higher than that, without going to Linus, and

that’s an advantage we have that other Linux projects

in the UK just don’t. A lot of it is built on cronyisms

and that certainly helps. It’s hard graft and when you

are putting, very often 21-hour days into open

source, you can’t be a family man as well.

So far, so good though, we are up to 740,000

installs worldwide since 2000 We know this because

each individual Smoothie calls home to register – we

are very open about that fact – we now have to

support users in 107 countries.

LM Is that the best way to describe how big the

SmoothWall project is, by the number of

installs?

RM I prefer to use financial figures. We have over

70,000 SmoothWall installs that manage systems

with more than 300 clients behind them. So, if you

imagine that company would have had to buy a

Cisco pixie box for $15,000 to $18,000 and instead

Richard Morrell

tells us about

SmoothWall, it’s

development and

shares with us his

views on Open

Source software

‘

’

Issue 15 • 2001

LINUX MAGAZINE

Richard Morrell and SmoothWall

We are up

to 740,000

installs

worldwide

INTERVIEW

Smoothwall

on a chip.

they have replaced it with something open source.

They don’t necessarily know it’s Linux and they don’t

really care, it does the job. Now if each of those PCs

has an inert value the SmoothWall protects

something in the region of $3.1 billion worth of

hardware worldwide and that’s just the corporate

clients, that doesn’t include home use. That also

doesn’t include the cable users. In the UK alone we

have over 24,000 installs. Now each one of those

SmoothWalls calls home, and you can’t argue with

the figures, they are in black and white, and we

make those figures public.

In the UK, we’ve been logging since April this

year, prior to that we didn’t bother because it was

still just us having fun. We then realised that this

could be commercial and we could be acquired. If

you are acquired you need to be very adult and

grown up and you need to be able to prove to

people what you’ve actually done. You can say I’ve

got 50,000 users, but unless you can prove it, it

doesn’t mean a thing.

Now if you look at the Web site you’ll see about

three or four thousand people who have written

back to say “Hey, we like this” and “Hey, we don’t

like that”, but you will also see some really nice

quotes. This is what really makes it worthwhile. It’s

not the money – because we don’t get paid. It’s

things like the government of Peru, they are

running SmoothWall instead of Cisco. Colleges in

the UK, they are ditching Cisco and being able to

use that money on teaching budgets, hospitals in

Australia, schools in China. You think “Cool!”,

that’s the nice thing.

You get the gimps and the gits who haven’t got a

clue. They read part of the GPL and don’t understand

what it means. If Richard Stallman says I’m GPL, I’m

GPL and we regularly go to battle with the Free

Software Foundation, who are a paper tiger with no

teeth at the moment.

LM How do you see the SmoothWall project

developing?

RM As of mid-November we became a limited

company. We’ve put too much money into

SmoothWall to keep it as a project. Just to keep it

alive costs me around £4,000 a month. We use

something like 1.4 terabytes of bandwidth a month

on the Web site. We get 16.1 million Web page hits

a month that’s a lot of hits and unfortunately that’s

got to be paid for, you can’t get sponsorship for that.

We are currently located in Raleigh, North Carolina,

alongside Red Hat: same ISP, different boxes. We pay

our bills, we have some sponsorship by High Speed

Web.net, a dubious ISP in North Carolina, but I don’t

care what their money is like, they pay for our

hosting. And then we have Tucows mirror sites in 11

or 12 countries.

We based the way that we’ve grown on what

Jeremy Allison has done with Samba. We have

learned to sit back and watched the failing of

other projects. We are quite aggressive and I think

we are seen as quite rude and arrogant, but then

there’s a reason for that – we’re not a Linux

project. Over 70 per cent of our users don’t use

Linux for their systems. Once SmoothWall is up, it’s

up – it’s just a box. You could paint it pink and put

a bow on it, it doesn’t matter, no keyboard, no

mouse – it’s a device.

SmoothWall enables someone to take some old

hardware, P133 or P100 and turn it into a box that

would have cost them thousands of dollars. Now

we’ve got our knockers that say that the Linux

Router project does this, and yes it does, but they do

it for the Linux community. How many Windows

users use that project? None. There are hundreds of

comments on the Web site from people that say

“This is the first time I’ve used Linux, I didn’t know

about it, thank you for making it so easy”. I go on

what people tell me.

LM What are the disadvantages with the way

the project has grown, did it grow too fast?

RM It didn’t grow too fast, it’s always been managed,

the trick with an open source project is ‘plan the

team’. It’s not different from building a sales team or

a management team. You’ve got to understand the

strengths and weaknesses of the people involved. As

project manager you’ve also got to be able to stand

back and let people stand on their own two feet,

without standing on their toes – too much.

My gut feeling with SmoothWall is that we,

deliberately, didn’t grow too fast. We could have

grown to 50 or 60 developers by opening up a CVS

tree and we didn’t. A CVS tree is all well and good if

you are running something like Gimp, or if you are

developing a multimedia application, or a theme for

KDE, where you need the input from designers and

graphics bods, and people with a knowledge of X

and KDE, from all over the world. SmoothWall is a

secure system, whether it’s based on Linux or BSD or

Mac, who gives a monkeys it’s secure. When we

release the product we release the source – that is

our definition of open source. If we used open source

ways of working, open source methodologies we

would be dead 13 months ago.

LM It’s obvious that you do spend a lot of time

on this project.

The

government

of Peru,

they are

running

Smoothwall

instead of

Cisco

’

LINUX MAGAZINE

Issue 15 • 2001

‘

INTERVIEW

RM A huge amount of time. I’m still on the IRC

channels at 2am kicking and banning people who are

moaning about the product, people say why are you

horrible to them, and I say it’s because they are not

customers. If they are going to be customers then

that is great but don’t come in here moaning

because you want a print server on SmoothWall.

Linux gives people an opportunity we never had as

developers six years ago. What SmoothWall should

show people is that you can take a Linux distribution

and all we did was take one CD. We cut it from 650

Mb down to 40Mb. Now, with a Linux distribution,

you have all the ingredients you need.

People make demands, they will say they want

SmoothWall to handle multiple IP aliasing. They

demand! Now to me demand means I delete, I’m

not interested. If people want to shout at me that’s

fine, they’re not paying me. I do give people want

they want, but I give it to them in a controlled

manner. We have our updates programme, which

works very well. You would expect the same of a

commercial software organisation. The product

works, it looks clean, it does what it says. The

documentation is OK, it’s not brilliant, but then it is

not a commercial product. Our commercial product

does have brilliant documentation, everything you

would expect of a professional product. But with the

GPL, we try to give people value, but for no money.

With the project we have given people the

opportunity to go away and think, if the SmoothWall

team can do it, as a hobby, imagine what really

could be done if someone really tried.

SmoothWall has done a lot of good, we have

raised a huge amount of money for charity. We have

been earning money for a year now for something

called the Dorothy Miles cultural centre in Fleet,

Hampshire. We read about them in the papers and

what we do is provide them facilities, they need a

copy of software or hardware, we will buy it for

them. We have always encouraged people who want

to give to charity on our behalf to give to Dorothy

Miles, I think we’ve raised about £5,000 for them,

which really makes me made up with happiness. We

sponsor a junior football team, which keeps you at

ground level.

What a lot of Linux companies have done is

sponsor beer fests and geek get-togethers.

LM Do you agree that there is a place for that?

RM Oh, yeah, it’s very necessary. I was doing it a

couple of nights back, I was geeking until 6am. But,

we’re having to move on.

The Linux industry in the UK doesn’t realise that

there is a demand for people with Linux skills, there

are not enough Linux consultants, spending enough

time in reality to address that skill shortage. They are

shooting themselves in the foot.

SmoothWall is about trying to be good at one little

thing. Don’t always try and be good at everything.

SmoothWall is about making something secure,

keeping it secure. Not trying to be too big for your

boots. Take the product and polish it, if you polish it

enough it shines. Were not shiny yet, but we are

getting there. It’s taken a long time. We are on our

ninth release.

LM With your aspiration towards a more

commercial project, what complication does that

give you with the GPL?

RM Very few!

My personal viewpoint for the necessity for the FSF

to remain a fighting political force is marred by the

fact that they are a force no more. They shout about

how the GPL has never been challenged in court. I

think they are probably quite thankful, because they

wouldn’t have the money to defend it.

LM Do you think the FSF could do more or

should have done more in the past?

RM I had an article in SmoothWall last week. I was

saying “We want to take SmoothWall commercial.

What can the FSF do to help us?”. Unfortunately the

FSF are not interested in helping good GPL projects

go commercial.

LM Why is that?

RM A very honest answer is that they don’t have any

money. To help people like this costs money. Now, if I

wanted advice from the FSF I would be happy to pay

for it, just like I would be happy to pay for a

consultant from the bank. The problem is they don’t

have the advice, they don’t have the finances to

develop advice.

Georg Greve works damn hard to give what help

he can. But there are differences between Europe

and America. He stands up for Richard Stallamn, who

sometimes can be a bit of a liability. Richard is a man

with ideologies and I admire him for his persistence.

There are people who are put on this planet to make

a difference, Richard is one of them.

LM How do you see online.smoothwall.org

developing?

RM That’s going to be a commercial subscription-

based support service, for people who download the

free software. They can use that or they can still use

the more traditional forms of support like

newsgroups and IRC. It costs money to run, but it is

important because it puts people in touch and it will

foster new customers for us commercially. For us, it is

a move away from mailing lists that are becoming

unmanageable. We’re getting 5,500 posts to some of

the mailing list, and I can’t cope with that, and if I

can’t cope with that then God knows what kind of

message it is sending to our customers. Flame wars

are far too easy to start on mailing lists as well, and

flame wars are so nineties!

Smoothwall

is about

trying to be

good at one

little thing

’

SmoothWall: www.smoothwall.org

Issue 15 • 2001

LINUX MAGAZINE

‘

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