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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.
Why not say that this behavior is the inadvertent result of placing 2 products, an SMTP gateway, and an antivirus client, side by side on the same server? the gateway stores the mail in a temporary store, whereupon the antivirus just happens to sanitize it, before the mail is again sent on it's way. This is obviousness in the extreme.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
The people who grant patents should be liable to be fired for gross incompetence?
If I file a patent for the process of giving names to children so they can be distinguished and it's granted, is there someone responsible for that? When a judge overturns the patent, the granter should suffer the consequences somehow.
Note that Barracuda's products are notorious for generating spam. Barracuda's engineers were informed of the problem years ago, provided with a fix -- and stubbornly refused to address the situation. It's no wonder that there are now thousands of Barracuda installations on various blacklists. (Two examples: Backscatterers and Backscatterer.org) Barracuda doesn't seem to care as long as they make money.
A secondary point is that Barracuda's products are NOT open-source. Oh, they're built almost entirely on open-source (an open-source operating system, an open-source mail server, an open-source anti-spam scanner, an open-source anti-virus scanner, etc.) but they're not open-source. Essentially what they've done is take all of that open-source code, slap a web front-end on it for the point-and-drool crowd, and then sell it. They're not in this to help out the Internet or stop spam or anything else admirable: they're in this to make money, and they're perfectly willing (see first point) to make the spam problem worse if it increases their profits.
They're not alone in that -- there are others out there who are in business to profit from our collective misery. An excellent way of spotting such companies is to ask the question: "What would happen if the problem they claim to address was actually solved?" If the answer to that question is "they would go out of business", then their motivation for always treating the symptoms and never treating the underlying cause will become clear.
Is anyone else starting to get tired of this?
The patent system was invented quite some decades ago to protect inventors from other people, who just stole their inventions and made profit of it.
Back in that days, inventions were actually realy made and development was so slow, that 20 years were a reasonable time for the protection of the invention.
Then time moved on, the number of real inventions did not realy rase, but most stuff was just a mere reorganization of existing stuff, but the number of patents went up.
Nowdays, if someone realy invents something, that would make the world a better place, some big corporation ensures, that it never surfaces bigger public, because that would harm their bussiness. (Like some drafts of more effective engines, and the like).
Now we start putting patents on Software, which is like a book, and should get copyright, but why on earth sould it be patented? And where does that benefit the creation of new inventions? It clearly does the opposit in most perspectives.
So maybe I'm missing the point, but I don't realy see, why this kind of system can keep existence, even thow it slowly brings economy to ruin and helps humanity to get a step closer to selfdestruction. Hmm.. Maybe I'm a bit exagerating, please prove me wrong.