The Untangle Story

Founding Story.  Dirk Morris and John Irwin were fed up. Bringing up a cheap and secure network environment in departmental or “small business” settings was just too hard. If the builder used commercial products, it was too expensive. If free/open source software was used, it was tedious at best and required multiple servers.

In the warm dry winter of 2002, they decided to do something about it. Like many Silicon Valley dreamers before them, they hit friends and family up for funds and started a company. They tapped their contacts at Carnegie-Mellon University and Stanford to build a strong core development team. And for the next three years, they went heads-down and cut code.

To cut product costs, they leveraged some 30 open source projects. To speed development and make the resulting code base more accessible, they leveraged Java. And to make it all perform on a single low-cost server, they invented and patented a new way of streamlining communications overhead between the modules. They called their solution “virtual pipelining.”

Beta trials in 2005-2006 told them that they had a product that was sellable and worked. In 2006, they sought and obtained “Series A” funding, which they used to hire the team that would scale the company. By year-end, the initial team was complete and sales were booming. They were now ready to take the next step – “giving back” to the open source community and simultaneously gaining even more operational leverage.

In June of 2007, the company open-sourced 95% of its code….

Mission.  Untangle exists to leverage open-source engineering practices to make it simpler and cheaper for businesses to create and maintain IT infrastructures.

Beliefs. In today’s rapidly-maturing software market, the ascendancy of open source methods is all but assured. This process began with infrastructure software, and is gradually climbing the software stack. The IT security space is now ripe for entry, and Untangle is picking up the sword.

Philosophy.  We stand on the shoulders of giants – Linus Torvalds, James Gosling, and many others – and fully expect others to someday stand on ours. We will maximize our contributions to the open source software collective, and give credit where appropriate. Our success is integrally tied to our healthy and vibrant connection to the community.

Ambitions.  We intend to make open-source software the preferred way that businesses securely communicate over the internet.