CPUG.org: The risks of centralized open-source

The recent events with CPUG.org (Barry shutting down the site) have led to many conversations between Check Point users around the globe. Who owns the knowledge accumulated on CPUG.org? Are the users of CPUG.org for sale? If the site never comes back up, what happens to all the content contributed by thousands of users around the world?

It causes you to think – when a community picks a site and decides to contribute content to it, is the community aware that it doesn’t own the content? What happens if YouTube were to shut down? It’s very different to open-source development, where each contributor essentially has a copy of all the code. Here, no single contributor has a copy of any of the content that CPUG.org contained. It’s all lost now.

The only upside of this turn of events is that something important has been emphasized yet again – knowledge is critical. In order to do their jobs, Check Point administrators around the globe have relied on CPUG.org for the knowledge it contained. Their job is now negatively impacted by the lack of CPUG.org’s availability. Knowledge is something that needs to be collected and protected.

At indeni, that is what we do. We collect knowledge, we deliver it and we ensure it won’t disappear one day. We’re sad to see what’s going on at CPUG.org but would like to take the opportunity to say: your knowledge is safe with us. We welcome any contribution of knowledge and will make it available to all of our users immediately. Therefore, your effort turns into direct assistance to others around the world, almost instantly. That’s powerful.

For examples of the knowledge indeni has in the Check Point world, click here.