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McAfee, Macromedia Flirting With F/OSS Community

Posted by timothy on from the batting-eyes-shuffling-feet dept.

xbsd writes "Those computer industry specialists claiming that the end of Linux is fast approaching may be interested in two recent movements inside the industry. Two weeks ago, McAfee, one of the world leaders in computer security products, launched its first commercial antivirus solution for Linux, and just yesterday, Macromedia announced that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation and plans to deliver a next-generation rich Internet application (RIA) development tool code-named Zorn based on the popular open-source IDE."

4 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Anti-Virus by bersl2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There's also ClamAV, which is a GPLed virus scanner (mainly for mailservers, but it does have a daemonized scanner and a CLI-based frontend).

  2. Turnabout by overshoot · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Well, fair's fair.

    Microsoft bought a Rumanian company that produced border protection (protect MS clients by filtering on Linux hosts) and turned around to "cut off [McAfee's] air supply" with an MS client antivirus offering. Of course they shut down the Linux border filters.

    In return, McAfee fills the vacuum by offering a Linux-hosted border filter.

    Works for me.

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  3. we cancelled the Mcafee contract at our company by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting


    we had a virus that corrupted MSIE (mshtml.dll) Mcafee was instantly disabled, that 100mb install became useless all because Mcafee based their application dialogs on the MSIE component

    we cancelled our contract with them soon after as we realised that if Mcafee dont understand security (they understand marketing though) so we will have to find someone who does understand security, and knows not to base the last line of defence on the biggest exploitable product on a windows system

    ClamAV is looking good because of the costing though reliabilty and accurate is still a concern

    -SJ

  4. McAfee by lheal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    McAfee started out as a shareware company, selling an antivirus program for MS-DOS and Macintosh.

    They acquired a bunch of smaller companies, then started calling themselves "Network Associates" soon after they acquired that company.

    While they haven't ever been open source, they've usually (always?) had a product you could download and use without first paying them for it. And I think they have always given out free updates.

    I wonder how much of their corporate culture has survived from the old days? To what degree is "McAfee" just a brand name?

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