Sophos would certainly have felt the wrath of the Sandboxie community if it would have stopped development. While you can achieve the same using virtual machines, one of Sandboxie's appeals was that it used the underlying system for its sandbox which meant no installation of operating systems or slow startups.

Sandboxie is a handy software for Windows to quickly run programs or files in a sandbox for security purposes. The license terms don't change according to this FAQ for paid license holders but customer support will become community based. It is unclear if the community will be 100% responsible for the development or if Sophos engineers will work on Sandboxie as well.Ĭustomers who purchased Sandboxie in the past are asked to update to the new version as well. Sophos plans to hand over the program to the community. Sandboxie has been turned into freeware and it will become an open source program in the future. The company promises that the information won't be used for marketing purposes. Sandboxie cannot be downloaded directly from the official website Sophos added a form to the download process that users need to fill out before the download is unlocked. Most notable the ability to force programs to run in the sandbox and the ability to create and use multiple sandboxes on the system, and even to run the same program in multiple sandboxes. The paid version of Sandboxie supported several features that the free version did not support. In other words: all features of the premium version of Sandboxie are available for free as of today. The new Sandboxie version that Sophos released today does not require an activation code and does not restrict access to features that were available to paid customers only previously. The company revealed plans to make Sandboxie an open source tool eventually.

Sophos announced the license change on the official Sophos Community blog today. Sophos did not change the Sandboxie license initially when it acquired the assets. Created by developer Ronen Tzur, it was picked up by Invincea before Invincea itself was acquired by security company Sophos. Sandboxie started out as a shareware program for Windows to run applications and files in a sandbox on the running system.