About Us

The Firewall Builder project was started by Vadim Kurland many years ago and it has grown substantially since it first started. The project is on release V4.0 and has thousands of users across the world who use the software regularly.

The Firewall Builder team currently includes Vadim, who is the primary contributor to the code, and Mike Horn who recently joined the project to help grow both the community and the company behind Firewall Builder.

The Firewall Builder Manifesto

As the Firewall Builder project continues to grow and evolve we felt it was important to publicly state our vision, principles and motivations.

First, a little history. Vadim started working on the Firewall Builder project in 1999 with the goal of creating the best cross platform firewall management software available. He spent countless nights and weekends developing and debugging the software in his "free" time and being the only significant developer contributing to the project with new major releases coming out every 2-3 years. This work has resulted in a very large and robust user community and in Firewall Builder being included in most of the popular Linux distributions.

Fast forward to 2010. Frustrated by the pace of developing Firewall Builder part-time Vadim quit his day job in the fall of 2009 to be able to devote his energies to developing Firewall Builder full-time. This resulted in getting V4.0 released in May 2010 which included many significant new features and enhancements. In 2010 Mike joined the Firewall Builder team because he saw Vadim's passion and commitment for creating tools that help make it easier for users to manage their firewalls across a variety of platforms.

Our goal remains the same. Create the best cross platform firewall management software available. We have a long list of features we want to add to Firewall Builder based on community input, conversations with users and our own ideas. Many of these features help users solve complex requirements and/or support very large scale firewall deployments. The challenge we face is that we need to add more development resources in order to implement features quickly and we need to be able to support ourselves while we focus on enhancing Firewall Builder.

After spending a lot of time thinking and talking about it internally and discussing the challenge with existing users we have decided to implement the following business model:

1. We will continue to develop a version of Firewall Builder that will always be available as open source, will be licensed under an open source license (GPL today) and will continue to be updated with new features and enhancements.
2. We will develop new commercially licensed applications that extend Firewall Builder to include features designed to benefit users with complex needs or large deployments. These applications will be only be available under a commercial license for all OS.
3. We plan to create support and training services for these new applications to help provide "enterprise class" support.

In open source projects finding the right balance between community and commercial interests can be challenging, but we don't think these interests have to conflict with each other.

The Firewall Builder team remains committed to developing open source software that helps users manage their firewalls while also pursuing our dreams of building applications that enable enterprises to manage very large and complex firewall deployments. And we believe that the open source Firewall Builder client will benefit from improvements made in these new applications.

We are excited to embark on the next phase of the Firewall Builder journey and we will do everything we can to live up to the high expectations of our community.

Vadim Kurland & Mike Horn