NAI puts PGP into Maintenance

[Len Sassaman]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> Dear Valued Customer,

[...]

>
> The PGP technology and source code will remain under the control and
> ownership of Network Associates. Other products that utilize this
> encryption technology will remain a part of Network Associates’
> current product portfolio and they will continue to be developed in
> order to meet the security needs of both new and existing Network
> Associates customers. These products currently include McAfee
> E-Business Server, McAfee Desktop Firewall and McAfee VPN Client.

This explains a few things. When I first saw the announcement that NAI was
selling PGP, I was very surprised at what they were selling and not
selling.

PGP used to be an "all-in-one" crypto solution, which included things like
a disk encryption program, an IPSEC implementation, and recently a
personal firewall in addition to the PGP mail and file encryption we're
used to.

It appeared from the original announcement that NAI wasn't going to be
selling some of the more interesting chunks of the product, such as the
IPSEC utility, the firewall, and most importantly, the SDK (which is the
heart of all the PGP programs.)

Without the SDK, I'm not sure how useful any of the other code would be to
a buyer. Apparently, not very.

"McAfee E-Business Server, McAfee Desktop Firewall and McAfee VPN Client"
have changed their names. I'm pretty sure that McAfee Desktop Firewall
used to be PGPfire. McAfee VPN Client was PGPnet. and McAfee E-Business
Server is the command-line version of PGP.

I find it hard to believe that NAI expects to make money selling
E-Business Server (for server-side PGP encryption) if there is no longer a
supported client-side implementation.


*boggle*


--Len.


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