RE: OSSIM Fedback

From: Strand, John (Mission Systems) (John.Strand@ngc.com)
Date: Tue Jun 13 2006 - 14:46:25 EDT


Don't know much about the code.

However, the Vmware image is cool and the .iso needs to be updated.

I think that there is great value in pulling all of these tools
together.

As usual, I am sure the installation process will get better over time.

Thanks,

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Dominique Karg [mailto:dk@ossim.net]
Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 1:37 AM
To: Stefano Zanero; Koolk3
Cc: security-basics@securityfocus.com; focus-ids@securityfocus.com;
pen-test@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: OSSIM Fedback

First of all my apologies for the cross-posting, I don't like it but
since it's been started this way I'll answer to the three lists.

It's not my duty to enter into discussion if ossim is easy to use or not
but I will freely admit that we'd love to have much more documentation
that there's already available. I hope time & third party contributions
will be able to close this gap in the near future, we'll see.

What made me enter this thread were what I see as accusations of
intentionally writing complex code.

I must say that I have to deny this and ask Stefano sincerely for proof
of this.

Ossim is a complex project, it's been evolving since more than four
years now and there are quite some things we have done in the past which
we don't like. Ossim has not been planned to it's current extent
beforehand because we haven't had tons of money to spend and the little
funding we had could only be consolidated having something working asap.
This is why parts of it may be not well documented, not clearly
structured and so on. But obfuscating / complicating code in purpose ?
No way.

Anyway, if you have had trouble understanding the code and needed help,
we've got a small but fine user base who would've been glad to help
(ourselves included). I recommend you trying out the vmware image we
released a couple of weeks ago, it is already setup and working and
could be used by anyone to at least "learn by example".

And, in order to close this mail and clarify a last thing, most of
what's included with ossim is being released under BSD license, if at
any time we had intention to avoid reuse of the code we would've used a
more restrictive license in the first place (like GPL), don't you think
so ?

Greetings,

Dominique

Am 12.06.2006 um 23:06 schrieb Stefano Zanero:

> We studied OSSIM in order to use it as a framework for implementing
> our own correlation algorithms.
>
> My experience is partially negative, in particular for the lack of
> documentation on installation and software internals. Additionally,
> the source code is intentionally complex and undocumented, to avoid
> forking or reuse... which is quite curious for a GPL software.

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