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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.
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.