Trend Micro Sues Barracuda Over Open Source Anti-Virus

Anti-virus firm Trend Micro is suing Barracuda Networks over their use of the open source anti-virus product ClamAV. The issue is Trend Micro's patent on 'anti-virus detection on an SMTP or FTP gateway'. Companies like Symantec and McAfee are already paying licensing fees to Trend Micro. Groklaw carries the word from Barracuda that they intend to fight this case, and are seeking information on prior art to bring to trial. Commentary on the O'Reilly site notes (in strident terms) the strange reality of patents gone bad, while a post to the C|Net site explores the potential ramifications for open source security projects. "Barracuda has been able to leverage open source to bring down the cost of security. Early on Barracuda was blocking spam and viruses at roughly 1/10 the price of the nearest proprietary competitor (that was only selling an antivirus solution). Barracuda has helped to bring down prices across the board, and it has been able to do so because of open source. More open source equals less spam and more security. Trend Micro is effectively trying to raise the price of security." Slashdot and Linux.com are both owned by SourceForge.

Comments

Yes

[niceone]

Trend Micro is effectively trying to raise the price of security

Um, that's what the patent system is supposed to do - to make it worthwhile investing in inventing things! Whether this is a reasonable thing to patent is another question, but you can't really complain about the patent system doing what it is meant to do.

Re:Yes

[smilindog2000]

In short, you can't violate a patent in your head. You should not be able to violate a patent by typing. This is the simple dividing line between the good and bad patents I see scrolling across slashdot. We let Microsoft and other big American companies con Congress into this, and the rest of the world isn't dumb enough to go along. Sooner or later, we need to fix this... every year it hurts our competitiveness.

Re:Yes

[troll -1]

Respectfully disagree.

The patent system is *not* supposed to raise the price of security.

The patent system is supposed to:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts [source: US Constitution, Article I, Sec. 8.

Making a profit from something as obvious as putting a filter in a firewall does little or nothing to achieve this goal. The largest patent holders (including IBM and Microsoft) all agree the system needs reform. But patent reform is a lot like campaign finance reform, everyone agrees there's a problem but no one really has anything they can realistically take to congress.

Hang on a second...

[PinkyDead]

I must be missing something here...

I have configured for a number of my clients their own SMTP servers for which I charge. These servers are generally gateways with postfix as the server. The anti-virus is ClamAV which is called by postfix.

Or to put it another way they have 'anti-virus detection on an SMTP or FTP gateway'.

Does this this mean I have violated this patent? Or should the patent be rewritten as 'Patent 5,623,600: Installing software on a computer'?