Tuesday, June 24, 2008

trend micro boycott

while i'm talking about trend micro i might as well mention this post advocating the boycott of their products because of their patent infringement suit against barracuda networks...

apparently there seems to be the idea that trend is trying to attack clamav and it's users through this suit, but i'm sure nothing could be further from the truth...

the fact is that clamav has been openly derided in the av community as inferior technology for years... nobody bothered trying to sue clamav when it was on it's own, and nobody tried when they were gobbled up by sourcefire... it would have been pointless and it would have lended credibility to a technology that has none...

the suit has nothing to do with the scanner technology and everything to do with the application of that technology... if trend has a valid patent (and since they've sued more mainstream av vendors over the same patent it seems like it might be) then people who make products using techniques covered by that patent need to work out a deal with trend... that's just the way patents work... i'm no intellectual property maximalist (heck, i classify DRM as a type of malware) but i recognize the law of the land when i see it...

barracuda isn't being singled out, clamav isn't the focus of some conspiracy by trend, other av vendors have had to deal with exactly the same intellectual property issue and somehow managed to resolve it... barracuda needs to do so as well, and some open source zealots need to get over themselves...

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