Thoughts on Open Source Project Mergers

Last month I blogged my installation of Nepenthes. Today I read the announcement that the Nepenthes and mwcollect projects have merged. From this point forward, the mwcollect Alliance will use Nepenthes to collect malware, and the mwcollect suite will be retired.

This announcement follows a similar development with the Auditor and iWhax assessment live CDs to merge into BackTrack. I think both of these developments are great. There are far too many attackers compared to security developers, so combining forces like this optimizes scarce resources. It would be nice to see similar consolidation in other projects, where appropriate.