Needing some software for this, I Googled around a bit. There were some commercial products. Most of the commercial products were big elaborate network management suites. I just wanted to sniff some traffic between my PC and a device. Looking around a bit, I found Ethereal.
Ethereal is free to download. It did what I wanted, allowing me to analyze the traffic and get a nice detailed view of what was going on. I recommend Ethereal for packet sniffing analysis. Pretty good for free. The commercial products were starting around $995.
Ethereal is just one of many free and open source products I use all the time. Here are some others I use now or have used heavily in the past.
- Eclipse, plus a number of quality free plugins
- Python
- JBoss
- Emacs
- SgMibSpy
- PHP
- Tomcat
- Apache Web server
- All kinds of Apache Jakarta Commons Java libraries
- MySQL
- Ant
- Java JDK
- Linux
- Firefox
What does it mean? Well in those areas above, it would be tough to sell me something when there is a quality alternative that I can download and use for free. Why pay $995 to sniff traffic when Ethereal is free? Why pay for a Java IDE when Eclipse is outstanding and free.
That's kind of the thing about open source. The stuff is great for a programmer as it makes your life so much easier and more productive. However, developing commercial software, you can see a potential threat to your company's area if a strong open source alternative was available. Where I'm at in consultingware, we tend to be industry specific, with services work with each sale. Since were not mass use general purpose we're probably not too threatened by open source at this time.
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