As we enjoy great advantages from inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others
by any invention of ours. And this we should do freely and generously.

Benjamin Franklin

 

When all Started

ntop started as an open source project in 1998 whose goal was to create a simple yet effective web-based traffic monitoring platform. Many things have changed since then, including the nature of the traffic being analyzed, operating systems running on PCs, and the type of users. ntop changed too and from a single-project centric effort, we evolved into a full fledged research company whose goal is still the original one. Namely innovate in network monitoring using commodity hardware and open-source operating systems. As we benefit from the open-source community, we feel obliged to return to the community what we develop, so that many others, and not just us, can benefit too.

 

Why is ntop Different?

The industry is full of hardware companies who bundle their products with open-source products, just to offer a sale argument for their products. Or software companies who depend on other (either hardware or software companies) for running their applications. ntop does not belong to any of these categories. We are not hardware-vendor dependent, and our software does not relies on third-party companies who might impose high license fee or decide to send us (and thus our users) out of business. We are developing both software that better exploit commodity hardware (so we’re not vendor locked) and that runs on the operating system kernel, and monitoring applications. We control the whole lifecycle, optimize every single bit, and provide you support for all our components, as we have developed them and nobody knows them better than us. This is quite rare on this market, and thus we have the ability to optimize the software for the hardware we use, and create better products. Very few other companies such as Ferrari, Ducati or Apple can do that (we’re small but we believe we belong to this club).

This is why people say: ntop means open-source from the source.