symantec kills free sygate firewall

[mouser]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28000

THE POPULAR Sygate Personal Firewall and the Pro version are to kick the bucket at the end of this month, news.com reports.
Symantec bought Sygate earlier this year, but according to the report customers will be offered upgrades from the software to its own Norton Personal Firewall.

The big difference is that Sygate Personal Firewall was free, and the upgrade to Pro was what cost.

A rep told news.com that the products "overlapped" in the consumer market.

[Carol Haynes]

A rep told news.com that the products "overlapped" in the consumer market.

Also known as competition ...

Its a great shame as it was a good firewall - and I moved to get away from Symantec. It's like being tracked by a rotweiller!

Symantec obviously din't like the fact that it was low impact and expect customers to downgrade to the bloatfest that is Symantec ...

At what point are Symantec going to be challenged for predatory monopolistic practices ???

[f0dder]

At what point are Symantec going to be challenged for predatory monopolistic practices ???

It seems only Microsoft is being targetted for this... while IMO other companies are just as bad. I really hate the way norton/symantec f?ck up all the products they buy up, with their insane bloat and whatnot

[m_s]

I have been wondering why Microsoft were (eventually) zapped by the European Commission for anti-competition infringements, when so many machines now come with Norton pre-installed.  I was setting up a new Compaq laptop last week, and it really made it quite difficult for the majority of users to choose not to use Norton.  Surely that's a transgression of similar rules to what got MS into trouble?  But I guess they would argue that they have some partner relationship with Compaq...

[Carol Haynes]

It's particularly difficult with lots of OEM systems that come with a restore disc rather than a standard Windows Installation disc. How do you get a clean install when you have to unistall loads of rubbish first (mostly Symantec stuff that doesn't fully uninstall itself)