Microsoft Acquires RAV Antivirus

Webmoth writes "Microsoft has announced the assimilation of RAV Antivirus from GeCAD Software of Romania. This is significant, because RAV Antivirus was one of the few antivirus products that provided cross-platform email virus scanning and spam filtering, integrating with sendmail and postfix on Linux (among others). No word yet on the impact to non-Microsoft users. In the process, they've left RAE Internet, the (former) exclusive U.S. distributor of RAV Antivirus, along with a host of authorized resellers, in the dust."

Comments

Email virus scanning?

[Electrum]

Scanning email for specific viruses is overkill. This solution stops more viruses (read: all of them) with far fewer system resources:

http://qmail.org/qmail-smtpd-viruscan-1.0.patch

ClamAV! ClamAV! ClamAV!

[steveha]

You know the old saying: when life throws you a curve ball, make lemonade. Or something like that.

I think we all agree that we like multi-platform virus scanning. This just goes to show the biggest advantage of free software: no one can ever take it away from you.

If Microsoft decides to, they can terminate all versions of this product but the Windows versions. If we can get a really effective free alternative, that can never happen. (The very worst thing that can happen is slow updates to the virus definitions.)

I have always thought that anti-virus software was an ideal candidate for free software. Non-coders can easily contribute: whenever they find a virus that the scanner doesn't know, just send it in. (They can find the virus either by using a payware virus scanner, such as Norton Antivirus, or they can find it the hard way by getting it. However they find it, they can send it in.)

Heck, I'd be willing to keep one machine with Windows on it, running Norton, and also run the free scanner on it, just to help out the community.

So, is there a free virus scanner? Yes. Two, actually.

First came OpenAntiVirus. But that project's virus database was last modified in October 2002. The better alternative is ClamAV.

ClamAV is available for a whole bunch of platforms, including Linux and FreeBSD. It can be set up to scan mail on servers. There is a library you can use to add antivirus scanning to your own applications (maybe OpenOffice should do that?).

I hope that lots of people will start running ClamAV, even just as a test project. Remember that you can put ClamAV on as many computers as you want, for free, but you can still buy a few payware virus scanners to hedge your bets if you want to.

If lots of people run ClamAV, and send in viruses that it misses, it should be able to find all the viruses that the payware can find.

steveha