Topic: Symantec kills off free Sygate firewall

[Clive]

Joris Evers
CNET News.com
November 29, 2005, 09:25 GMT
  
Sygate's free Personal Firewall product is being killed off by Symantec, to avoid overlap with its paid-for Norton-branded offering

One month after closing the Sygate Technologies takeover, Symantec is cutting the Sygate Personal Firewall products because of overlap with the Norton Personal Firewall.

The Sygate Personal Firewall and Sygate Personal Firewall Pro products will no longer be available effective 30 November, Symantec spokesman Phil Weiler said Monday. Consumers will receive special upgrade pricing when they buy a replacement product from Symantec's Norton family of Internet security products, he said.

By pulling the Sygate Personal Firewall, Symantec is further reducing the options for people looking for a free firewall for their computer. Sygate offered the Sygate Personal Firewall at no cost and sold Sygate Personal Firewall Pro. Kerio Technologies has previously said it will discontinue its desktop firewall at the end of this year.

"While the Sygate products complement our enterprise offerings, there was an overlap on the consumer side of the business. After looking at the Sygate Personal Firewall technology we decided to discontinue the products and continue selling Norton Personal Firewall," Weiler said. In other news:

The Sygate Personal Firewall was downloaded more than 3.6 million times from CNET Download.com, a division of CNET Networks, the publisher of ZDNet UK.

Consumers looking for a free firewall still have options. These include Zone Labs' Zone Alarm, Microsoft's Windows Firewall and Jetico.

Symantec will continue to support and develop the Sygate enterprise product portfolio, including Symantec Sygate Enterprise Protection, Symantec Sygate On-Demand, Symantec Sygate Embedded and Symantec Sygate Network Access Control, Weiler said.

Symantec announced the takeover of Sygate in August. The deal was closed in October.
 
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39238815,00.htm

[Simon]

Blimey, that's a bit much!  Sygate is / was a bloody good firewall, and certainly better than some older versions of Norton's Personal Firewall.  I wonder if existing Sygate Pro users will be able to continue using the product?  I have installed this on one or two machines recently, where NPF was giving problems.

[chorleydave]

Well, those who already have Sygate should be OK as long as they have the setup file.  I still use Zone Alarm 2.0 circa 1999, and all tests on PC Flank etc. show my machine as "stealthed" which is good enough for me.  I'm not interested at all in these "security suite" things, as to me they are the proverbial washer/drier of the software world - if one part packs up, the other part usually goes with it.  A separate anti-virus, firewall, ad blocker etc has always worked for me (except during my recent experiment with Windows 2000 Pro which ate the .dll's) and in six years I have never had a single virus.

It's a shame, though.  I used Sygate for a couple of years and always found it simple to use and effective.

[sam]

yeah everyone should use zone alarm - nice piece of windows software, or switch to linux and not have to ever worry!