Scarcely a week goes by when I don't hear about yet another new (or relatively new) open source project that stands in for a proprietary solution. Consider Untangle, a network gateway appliance that runs on any commodity hardware and handles spam, firewalling, Web filtering and protocol controls, VPN, and tons more. They'll even send you a preloaded demo server.

Untangle bundles 12 GNU GPLv2-licensed apps under one roof, including reporting and analysis tools to help you make sense of it all. The OS also is included -- all you need do is download an ISO and burn an install disc, or boot the ISO in a virtual machine. If you'd rather just snag a prebuilt VMware appliance, you can do that as well. The whole thing's managed through a slick-looking set of graphical control panels.

The core version doesn't cost a dime to use, of course, but Untangle-the-company also offers commercial add-ons -- live tech support, high-end management functions, remote access, or Active Directory integration. All of this comes at very reasonable prices -- on the order of $2.50 a seat per month for starters, and it just gets cheaper from there.

One future possibility that suggests itself is alternate builds of Untangle for home users vs. corporate users -- for instance, including a NAS or media-sharing module so that an Untangle instance also can be used for easily hosting shared content for a household (or a SOHO environment). This wouldn't have to be something that Untangle itself would produce, either; it could be a community "respin."

As a side note, it's funny how things come to our attention. Word of Untangle came to me via its Installfest for Schools event at LinuxWorld, where it will be recycling older PCs with Linux to be donated to schools worldwide. Now that's a very thoughtful way to walk it like you talk it.