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SoftEther VPN Becomes Open Source on January 4, 2014.
January 4, 2014
By Daiyuu Nobori, SoftEther VPN Project at University of
Tsukuba, Japan.
 We are very happy to announce that the source code of
SoftEther VPN is released as open-source software under the
GPLv2 license. SoftEther VPN is the underlying VPN engine of
VPN Gate. The source code is provided as packages in .tar.gz
and .zip formats, and is also published on our GitHub
repository. You can build the full SoftEther VPN programs
from the source code in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD or
Solaris computers. You can also generate your own customized
installer packages of SoftEther VPN automatically from the
source code.
Download Binary
Download Source Code
You can download the latest SoftEther VPN source-code
tree. You can build the full SoftEther VPN programs from the
source code in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD or Solaris
computers. You can also generate your own customized
installer packages of SoftEther VPN automatically from the
source code. You can redistribute them and/or modify them
under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2
as published by the Free Software Foundation.
From Free Internet World:
You can go to the
https://www.softether.org/5-download/src web page to see
how to download and build the source code of SoftEther VPN.
(日本語でのソースコードビルド方法について:
https://ja.softether.org/5-download/src)
From Behind Government Censorship Firewall:
Because SoftEther VPN is overly strong tool to build a
VPN tunnel, some censorship governments want to block your
access to the source code of SoftEther VPN, by abusing their
censorship firewalls.
Even if you cannot access to our www.softether.org
domain, you can obtain the latest source code of SoftEther
VPN from GitHub or other open-source repositories.
To circumvent your censor's unjust restriction, SoftEther
VPN Project distributes the up-to-date source-code on all
the following open-source repositories:
To fetch the source code from GitHub:
$ git clone
https://github.com/SoftEtherVPN/SoftEtherVPN.git
To fetch the source code from SourceForge:
$ git clone
http://git.code.sf.net/p/softethervpn/code
- or -
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/softethervpn/code
To fetch the source code from Google Code:
git clone
https://code.google.com/p/softether/
We hope that you can reach one of the above URLs at
least!
News Article
Note: the following article is also posted at
https://www.softether.org/9-about/News/800-open-source.
(以下の記事の日本語版は、https://ja.softether.org/9-about/News/800-open-source
に掲載されています。)
We are very happy to announce that the source code of
SoftEther VPN is released as open-source software under the
GPLv2 license. SoftEther VPN is the underlying VPN engine of
VPN Gate. The source code is provided as packages in .tar.gz
and .zip formats, and is also published on our GitHub
repository. You can build the full SoftEther VPN programs
from the source code in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD or
Solaris computers. You can also generate your own customized
installer packages of SoftEther VPN automatically from the
source code.
SoftEther VPN is a product-class VPN software suite with
popularity as a tool to build on-premise or cloud-base VPNs.
The binaries of SoftEther VPN was released on March 8, 2013.
Since then, SoftEther VPN Server has been installed into
over 80,000+ server computers in Japan, United States,
China, Taiwan, Iran, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Korea,
India and other 164 regions (*1). SoftEther VPN supports
Windows, Mac, Linux, and smartphones including iPhone and
Android. SoftEther VPN supports multiple VPN protocols
including SSL-VPN, OpenVPN, IPsec, L2TP, MS-SSTP, L2TPv3 and
EtherIP, by a single instance of VPN server program.
Individual and corporate network administrators can replace
their legacy OpenVPN or Cisco's VPN router products by
SoftEther VPN for integration.
One of the popular application of SoftEther VPN is VPN
Gate (http://www.vpngate.net/).
VPN Gate is
"A Volunteer-Organized Public VPN Relay System with Blocking
Resistance for Bypassing Government Censorship Firewalls"
(*2).
VPN Gate is a circumvention tool for bypassing governments'
censorship firewalls. Many Internet users behind censorship
firewall, including Chinese Great Firewall, are using VPN
Gate to browse YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Daily 110,000+
unique users (estimated by the number of client IP
addresses) are using VPN Gate
(*4).
The offense and defense between VPN Gate and Chinese Great
Firewall will be reported on
USENIX NSDI 2014 International Conference (Seattle,
April 2-4, 2014)
(*3).
The text data of the source code of SoftEther VPN is
approximately 380,000 lines. The total file size is 11
Mbytes. The source code includes not only the user-mode
programs of SoftEther VPN, but also kernel-mode device
driver codes for Virtual Network Adapter and Ethernet
Bridging Module.
Many developers are now able to download the SoftEther
VPN source code and study the technique how to design and
implement a VPN protocol-engine to achieve the
high-performance, multi-protocol support VPN communication
with high-level penetrating-ability against firewalls. They
can also study the know-how to implement kernel-mode device
drivers which access to low-level Ethernet packet processing
fabric on Windows and other modern operating systems.
Furthermore, because the source code is published under
the traditional GPLv2 (GNU General Public License version
2), SoftEther VPN is granted to be modified, be recompiled,
be embedded into derived software or hardware, or be
redistributed with new branding, by any developers who have
abilities to do so.
We believe that easy-to-use software-based VPN tools are
necessary to achieve the free Internet world. Herein, the
free Internet world means that any governments cannot censor
or tap over the communication of people, and people can use
communication technology without any kind of fears of
suppression by governments. However, implementing such an
easy-to-use VPN tool has required enormous difficult effort
to implement the VPN engines. By using the source code of
SoftEther VPN, any developer can exploit it to build his own
VPN-based application. We hope that the release of SoftEther
VPN source code will help such developers, and will also
help to achieve the free Internet world in future.
*1
Current geographic
locations of 81,424 SoftEther VPN Server users on January 4,
2014.
SoftEther VPN Server is
installed on server computers around the world.
*2
The offense and defense between VPN Gate and Chinese Great
Firewall will be reported on our academic paper: "VPN Gate:
A Volunteer-Organized Public VPN Relay System with Blocking
Resistance for Bypassing Government Censorship Firewalls"
which was accepted on the USENIX NSDI 2014 International
Conference (Seattle, April 2-4, 2014).
More details: https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi14/technical-sessions/presentation/nobori.
*3
The graph of number of daily unique source IP addresses of
VPN Gate clients.
*4
The ranking table of VPN Gate client source locations.
More details in real time: http://www.vpngate.net/en/region.aspx.
OpenVPN vs. SoftEther VPN
Many people have a question: what is the advantage of
SoftEther VPN to OpenVPN?
Obviously, OpenVPN is an excellent tool. However, the
development of OpenVPN has been stalled for many years.
OpenVPN has no significant improvement in recent years.
SoftEther VPN has many advantages to OpenVPN as the
following table. SoftEther VPN supports multi VPN protocols
and multi native-VPN clients of various operating systems.
SoftEther VPN has an easy-to-use VPN server management GUI
tool. SoftEther VPN has also multi-language support. There
are any other advantages in SoftEther VPN. Furthermore,
SoftEther VPN has the OpenVPN-clone server function. It
means that any OpenVPN users can replace it to SoftEther VPN
seamlessly.
The SoftEther VPN Project believes that SoftEther VPN has
the potential ability to occupy the position of today's
OpenVPN.
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