Why do Norton Utilities and other Symantec software not exist for Linux?

A couple years ago Symantec evaluated porting their products, or some of them, to Linux. They obviously came to the same conclusion as the Linux community: Norton is irrelevant for Linux.

This is a news article posting that explains the reasons, but also mentions some reasons why a port would perhaps make sense. But nevertheless, I think Norton is never going to do it, especially because when they tried developing a similar suite for OS/2, Microsoft tightened their thumb screws in that they weren't allowed any "insider information" about Windows any more (and how can you develop rescue software for a system you aren't allowed to know the internals of?).

Headline: Symantec is irrelevant for Linux

Symantec & Lotus: They already sold out, or have been crushed by Microsoft. Much more worrisome.

Of course Symantec wouldn't port their products to Linux. Most of Symantec's products would be completely unnecessary under Linux. Symantec's products page presently lists 17 software products, of which three serve solely to fix Windows or MacOS design flaws, eight serve purposes already well-served by existing free software, and two serve political purposes not in tune with many or most users of Linux-based OSes. I count only three as potential Linux-based products.

The following Symantec products serve to correct or work around design flaws of Windows/DOS or MacOS:

• Norton AntiVirus -- While viruses running under Linux have been created as experiments, the Linux platform does not suffer from the promiscuous vulnerability to machine-code viruses of unprotected platforms. Nor do Linux's popular applications suffer from unprotected scripting systems vulnerable to viruses.
• Norton CleanSweep -- Almost all Linux-based OSes use package-management systems such as dpkg and rpm, which permit the clean uninstallation of programs, if the package maintainer did things properly.
  If you just blindly (compile and) install things from the web, then you are on your own - under any operating system. No "cleaner" utility could help you there.
• Norton Speed Disk -- ext2fs, the current standard filesystem for Linux, does not suffer from the severe fragmentation problems of FAT, nor from the somewhat lesser but noticeable ones of FAT's successors and MacOS's HFS.
  ReiserFS, XFS and JFS are even better in that respect. Better than NTFS, if you want to believe independant observations (claims by Novell for example).

The following Symantec products serve purposes already filled by existing free software:

• Mail Gear -- The foremost mail daemons for Linux (such as sendmail, postfix, and qmail) already support the filtration of mail. Users can use procmail recipes or other tools to accomplish the task at their level. GUI interfaces for MTA or MDA configuration are shipped with the current distributions.
• Norton Ghost -- Virtually every Linux-based OS ships with backup/recovery and disk-imaging tools such as dump, tar, and dd. There are also GUI-based versions such as guiTAR available. Of course, you can also buy many professional backup systems.
  If you just want your machine backed up I recommend to have a look at Mondo Rescue. It's a free backup software that backs up your complete system to a bootable CD-R(W) and lets you restore from there. It doesn't have a GUI, but its free!
• Norton Internet Security (firewall portion) -- Firewall capability is built into the Linux kernel. Several popular free packages exist to do rule-based intrusion detection, such as snort. If you want a pretty GUI use Guarddog & Guidedog.
• Norton Utilities -- Though ext2fs is more robust than FAT or HFS, it can suffer from disk hosement in certain situations (such as loss of power); in these cases, Linux already has fsck. (Norton Utilities also contains tools that belong in the previous category, such as software to prevent program crashes from bringing down the whole OS.)
• pcAnywhere -- Linux has ssh and X for secure remote login and display. It has VNC and/or KRFB to remote control Windows and Linux servers via GUI and run headless GUIs on remote (Linux) machines.
• Procomm Plus -- The last thing Linux needs is another terminal emulator.
• Retriever -- Port-scanning software is hardly anything new to Unix; for network security mapping try SATAN or one of its derivatives such as SAINT.
• WinFax PRO -- The Hylafax system supports the sending and receiving of faxes under Linux (and other Unices) as well as network-based faxing. And the integration into KDE offers printing integration, fax server support, multiple backends and ease-of-use.

The following Symantec products serve political purposes not in tune with many or most Linux users; specifically, they are parental or office censorware:

• I-Gear
• Norton Internet Security (censorware portion)

(The functionality of censorware may be duplicated with free software, so these could perhaps be put in the previous category; however, due to the general opinion of censorware as Bad And Wrong [i.e. unethical on principle and furthermore broken in its implementations] among the Linux community, they belong in their own category.)

The following Symantec products are potentially useful under a Linux-based OS:

• Expert -- From the blurb, this sounds like an attempt at implementing Bruce Schneier's model of analyzing security as a business risk. (I am not convinced that Schneier is right, nor do I claim that Symantec Expert is a good implementation of his ideas ... but that's another story.)
• Mobile Essentials -- While one could well keep several versions of /etc in tarballs and untar the right one for each location, I imagine laptop users would like a clean way to switch from one set of settings to another. Current distributions alread implement the "profile" idea, also the KDE desktop has improved its behaviour when running on battery (optionally turn off screensavers, for example).
• TalkWorks PRO -- The last time I looked into the matter, there didn't seem to be any reasonably advanced voice-mail or answering-machine packages for Linux.

(Mobile WinFax is not counted as it runs on the PalmOS, not a conventional OS. Norton SystemWorks is not counted because it is a bundle of several packages listed above.)

In short, it is not to be taken as a surprise that Symantec, and other "utility software" companies, see themselves as not having anything to offer the Linux community -- they don't.