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Trend Micro Draws Boycott Over AV Patent Case
Linux.com is reporting that in addition to the bad press, Trend Micro's patent case against Barracuda Networks' use of ClamAV has drawn an apparent boycott of Trend Micro. "Dutch free knowledge and culture advocacy group ScriptumLibre called for 'a worldwide boycott on Trend Micro products.' In its news release, ScriptumLibre summarizes the case, with its chairman, Wiebe van der Worp, describing Trend Micro's actions as 'well beyond the borders of decency.' The ScriptumLibre site includes link to free graphics that supporters can add to their Web pages to show their support and a call for IT professionals that provides a links to help people to educate themselves about the case and suggests a series of actions that people can take in the boycott." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge Inc.
What you mean is a couple of random people have mooted a boycott. Well I'm sure Trend will issue a profit warning to investors post haste.
If you want to see how the open source world responds to threats, look no further than SCO. Many Linux fans are also Unix admins at work, and many of them got their employers to switch from SCO to *anything other Unix-like OS* in response to the threats. Now SCO is in bankruptcy and not likely to come out.
My little Linux and tech blog
Isn't it time people start boycotting _all_ commercial antivirus programs?
The business model for most of these companies is nothing more than extortion (ie. pay up on your Norton subscription or we'll trash your Windows install).
Many OEM computers come with AV programs out of the box that are only good for several months. My aunt's computer was like this (a Dell). She's not very technical, so she didn't realize that she had to pay to keep something working that came free with her computer. After the "free trial" was up, Norton silently died leaving her computer vulnerable to all sorts of nasties (no firewall, on AOL dialup, yuck). The Norton uninstall program often does not work, leaving many of Nortons "hooks" still installed in the OS.
I've said it many times, all you need is a router and some common sense (not using Internet Explorer helps). If you really can't help clicking on "free ipod" ads, then fine use an antivirus program, but for god's sake don't use Norton, Trend Micro, or any of the subscription based crap that's out there.
And yes, I realize this article is not about Norton, but Norton and Trend Micro are in the same boat IMO.
The only good thing Trend Micro has ever made is their "House Call" virus scanner in Java. It's a nice way to clean up trashed pc's without having to install software (most PC's have Java already installed nowadays).
litigate
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
disturbing Trend?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I've been evaluating their client server product for SMB for a week now. I need about 75 licenses to replace our aging Symantec Corporate 7. I was a couple of days away from purchasing 75 licenses for one company and 10 for another, but then this. I vote with my dollars and if my research shows their claims are BS, they just lost 85 2-year licenses.
Look up the meaning as a transitive verb. As a kind gesture I even used one of them colonial dictionaries that I assume represents your cultural persuasion. Some guys representing nobody in particular saying "Oh hay guys, maybe we shouldn't use Trend" is hardly an example of mass agreement from the throngs.
What about the one's that don't? I think we should boycott the law.
Patents worked when it was about the small time inventor and they help start up companies. Once the industry giants and well established companies get hold of patents they use them in an anti-competitive manner.
Software patents are the easiest to code around but can be the hardest to judge when they go to court.
It's not illegal for corporations which engage in journalism to report the news, even when it's news of a boycott. Thanks for playing, please try again.
They might be officially American but in reality they are a Taiwanese company.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Trend Micro is not a patent troll, they are a legitimate company who patented a process that they developed. Now they are exercising their rights as a patent holder. So why the hate? This is what the patent system is designed to do.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Barracuda Networks uses open source, but as far as I can may invalidate Trend's patent and that is a good thing for the open source community, but he's not doing it for the open source community, he's doing it to protect his companies profits. Barracuda Networks doesn't give away anything.
When Sun got sued by NetApps over open source ZFS, which they do give away, did you see them run crying to the open source community for help?
That is just one example of a real contributor being sued, but there I'm sure there are a ton of others.
Dean, if you want help, maybe you should think about giving something back to the open source community.
I already have a firm policy of not buying from them because their products are crap and their technical support can be spectacularly unhelpful. They end-of-lifed a product that barely worked (the original Viruswall for Linux) and forced us to migrate by discontinuing virus signature updates. The product they replaced it with (VirusWall SMB for Linux) crashed on a daily-to-hourly basis, and over a period of weeks my repeated cries for help were basically ignored. We replaced their product with a Linux box running ClamAV and Postfix, which has run flawlessly ever since. No wonder they've turned to litigation.
include $sig;
1;
Trend Micro is not a patent troll, they are a legitimate company who patented a process that they developed. Now they are exercising their rights as a patent holder. So why the hate? This is what the patent system is designed to do.
As I understand it, the patent involves filtering viruses before they make it to end user computers; eg. at the router/mail relay etc. The reason for the hate is that this is an obvious way to prevent viruses from entering your network. The hate is not so much aimed at Trend Micro as it is at the broken patent. However, the fact that Trend Micro is suing their competition using a broken patent as ammo is not going to earn Trend Micro any kudos.
Gee, what planet are you from? Obviously one without a constitution.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
However, much as I like Open Source Software in general, I consider it perfectly OK if people decide to use commercial, closed-source, anti-virus software. I would urge them to (re)consider using such software in favour of OSS, but if they wish, for whatever reason, to spend their money on closed-source anti-virus software, then best of luck to them (and the producers of closed-source AV software).
What galls me in this case is the unfair way in which Trend Micro uses a blindingly obvious patent they somehow got their hands on to squeeze an OSS competitor out of the market. The patent, basically the idea of having a virus scanner on gateway servers to a network that scans incoming files as they are being transmitted, is of course trivial.
Why?
The idea that in order to prevent infected files from entering a network, you can do the checks "at the border", i.e. in the gateway server, is about as obvious as the idea of keeping a place dry by having a roof and 4 walls. Since the incoming files aren't stored on the gateway server but immediately forwarded, the only thing you can do is to stream the incoming file through an AV scanner. Patenting an "invention" like that is of course only possible in the US.
Unfortunately the law says that even such patents have force, so an unscrupulous commercial AV vendor (Trend Micro) can use it to sue people for doing this.
That's why I'd support a boycott of Trend Micro. Not because they're closed-source vendors, but because they behave like thugs.
Trend Micro is not a patent troll, they are a legitimate company who patented a process that they developed.
They didn't "patent a process", they have patented an entire category of applications, and one that they did not invent.
I could care less. For all intents and purposes, Trend's software and hardware (Yes, they do build appliances) is, in my opinion, is the best option going for real AV protection. It catches what it can catch, does not bog down your box and when/if you need to remove it, it goes away with ZERO fuss, far unlike that of McAfee and Symantec products. Trend did have some issues on the consumer payware download where they sort of hid the fact they would re-charge your credit card next year for your renewal and you needed to jump through hoops to undo that, but have since fixed it and when you go to purchase it, there's a link to decide how long you want to renew and if you want to auto-renew/charge your card. As far as their being called a patent troll by the FOSS community...I think people forgot what a real troll is - Like NTP or the group has recently begun to sue every smartphone manufacturer under the sun (it was on /. a week or so ago). Trend writes the software and builds the hardware they patented. Good for them. Sue Clam if they ripped you off and choose not to license your technology *like most of the major players in the AV industry is currently doing*. They have every right to protect their patent which isn't some vague idea they're camping on but are are actively developing against. Last time I checked, that's what patents were for.
If you are planning to boycott them, as I am, send an email letting them know. If they get enough of those, they'll start to notice.
Stupid question:
Who did invent the category?
Kid-proof tablet..
Software patents are IMHO something that should not exist. Copyright makes far more sense than vague patents that usually can be stewed down to "anything at all to solve problem A".
The previous post is brought to you by another, defective ignorant wanna-be poweruser.
Last I checked, ClamAV IS NOT a "security suite" - is it an Anti Virus scanner. Nothing more.
What evidence to you have that it is defective? This short ClamAV user-base seems to find it to be effective enough to actually write about their success. And many on this list are not little SO-HO / Hobby companies.
My guess, your only experience with ClamAV is on the desktop. Where I would agree it is not the best choice for "Joe Six Pack". Where it shines on the server/gateway. How many servers do you admin? What is your user base on those servers? How much experience do you have with sever side AV?
Please bring facts next time, and keep your trolling to yourself.
Many people, really. Read the discussion of prior art last time this came up here. Nobody should have been granted a patent on something this broad. If they had had a particular, clever method for actually doing the detection faster or more reliably, then that might have warranted a patent.
Ummm... since when is ClamAV a security suite? I think you have no clue what you're talking about. A suite is a group of tools doing multiple different jobs, yet they work together. Like a firewall and an antivirus program being rolled into one "suite". ClamAV does... antivirus. And that's it. End of story. ClamAV is very good at what it does (especially relative to all the competitors in the field), it's lightweight, updated often, easy to use and install, exceptionally flexible in it's application, and it just works.
Feel free to correct any misapprehensions I may have, though... what exactly is it that Avast does better than ClamAV? Runs on Linux? No, that can't be it... free? Nope, Avast is only free for home use only (not even non-commercial use is allowed). Can it be chained into an email server? Nope. I can't really see any reason that Avast is significantly better than ClamAV for anyone other than grandma.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Either one is clearer. Either gets your point across better.
/. readership.
No, "mooted" is the correct word to use here, and is perfectly clear. I know most Americans are functionally illiterate, but I'd have expected better from the
At first glance, I knew what was said. I wasn't sure if the word was accurate, but I knew what was said (having heard the word "moot" ought to do it). -> the boycott was doomed, a fruitless exercise. A small stretch to add something of value to my understanding of English. (which, isn't all that great, anyways) But, I'd be willing to bet the both of you excel at scrabble, where the rest of us don't.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
I agree that Trend Micro's behavior is bad. However, the only people that will know about this boycott, and the only people who will understand the problem are technical people, and technical people already don't use Trend Micro's products.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Why are there so many people who, as professionals in our industry are wont, have already made the decision not to use Trend Micro's products due to their functional deficiencies pretending like they're going to "boycott" them because of their ethically questionable business practices (founded on their sketchy patent)?!?
Do we really need these kinds of crusades to feel better about our participation in society? I feel like I need to go on some kind of religiously-zealous war against you guys.
If irony was strawberries I'd be drinking a lot of smoothies right now...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I'd be willing to bet the both of you excel at scrabble
I don't. I'm too dyslexic for Scrabble.
Not so - it is used quite frequently although perhaps not in your own country. In the UK it has no specific connection with legal matters.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Would you support a company that sued its competitors users?
SCO sued their own customers which is one thing, but if the bad trend of sueing your competitors users takes hold it will be bad for commerce all round as no-one will want to buy any software for fear of having their expected return on investment nullified.
Trend's bad trend is bad for global software business and all software businesses should sit on trend until they stop damaging the markingplace which is the last thing we need in the current economy.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Barracuda does contribute a good amount to the open source community.
Check out the page at http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/company/open-source.php
They have donated cash to Apache Foundation, FSF, and PopFile. They have donated hardware for development to ClamAV, ISC, lm-sensors, SURBL and others...
They operate mirrors for SaneSecurity, and SURBL free of charge.
They have donated $$ to Spamhaus.
They have donated a lot of code and sponsored several projects.
The project leader for the Psi Jabber Client project is a full time employee at Barracuda who is paid to lead the project.
How could you claim that Barracuda does not support open source?
Mod parent up as funny. It is a joke. Even it it was not intended as one by the poster.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
That meaning of the word is not used in colloquial speech; if you do use it that way, you (1) risk being misunderstood, and (2) mostly show that you don't understand usage and language levels. Eh? I understood it... and I'm an American, so take that!
I'm really confused by this thread. I read the first post, and it was obvious what it meant and correct, common usage, English. Can someone please explain exactly what the problem is? Or should we all post in simple English?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've played with both Sun's Solaris Express (OpenSolaris plus some closed stuff) and Nexenta (GNU/OpenSolaris). Solaris Express feels like a pure System V system. It also supports BSD and GNU tools in separate paths though, so you can use a different userland personality by altering the order of your path. The big exception to SysV feel is SMF, which is similar to Apple's Launchd and gives a much nicer (unified) admin interface to things than the crufty old SysV init. Nexenta feels a lot like Ubuntu, but with a nicer kernel. The man pages on Solaris are a lot better than their GNU/Linux counterparts - I would put them on a par with OpenBSD (some better, some worse).
Solaris is the only *NIX variant I have used where I can write against the POSIX/SUS specs and expect it to Just Work(TM) (possibly OS X 10.5 is there now it is UNIX certified). For example, using the realtime POSIX extensions on Linux and FreeBSD is very hit-and-miss, while on Solaris they are fully supported.
Finally, ZFS is awesome. It redefines the block device/filesystem/VFS stack and gives features that you typically need a RDBMS to use. Building a simple RDBMS on ZFS would be really easy, since you get most of ACID compliance from the underlying filesystem, including full transactional support. For an example of why this is incredibly shiny, take a look at how Nexenta handle updates. When you do an update, it starts a ZFS transaction, does the update, and then ends the transaction. If the update had some nasty side-effects, you can trivially revert it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I figured I'd got modded off-topic but I have karma to burn as well. And frankly, if the moderator(s) feel like wasting their points on this, instead of the stupid memes people post, that's their problem. Thanks for responding (and risking your karma).
The computer science department at my university has a unix box which runs Solaris on a sparc architecture. It's where we typically submit our programming assignments and such. It has always played well with my programs, including POSIX, (like you said) so when I saw that they have an open source distro available my interest was piqued. I don't know anyone that has it, so your response helped quite a bit. I'm pretty much set on switching to it when it's time to show Fedora the door.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
This presents an interesting problem. As a practical matter, anti-spam and anti-virus need to be bundled in the same Internet mail gateway (at least this is how this is done in practice). So what if someone sued Trend Micro because their anti-spam technology infringed on a patent? Or, perhaps the encryption technology that is built into Trend Micro Internet Messaging Security Suite?
BTW, I have used their gateway in the past, and found it sorely lacking in anti-spam capability. This makes it not a very good product, which makes me wonder just what the lawsuit is defending.
They didn't patent something they created. They patented the obvious
and took advantage of a badly broken patent system. Then they proceeded
to use that bad patent to bully their competitors in the courts rather
than making a superior product.
They are another Tivo.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
SPARC boxes running Solaris are really great for testing code. If your code works on OpenBSD (highly non-deterministic malloc, close to pure BSD OS) running on IA32 (no alignment restrictions, 32-bit, little endian) and Solaris (deterministic memory layout, close to pure SysV) on SPARC (strict alignment restrictions, 64-bit, big endian) it is likely to work anywhere.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
we have sophos and in my opinion the central management is fairly straight-forward, and there is a lot of control over AV, firewall, application policies. it can sync with AD containers so it detects new wkstns itself, and works with vista. the only thing is the initial setup and d/l is kinda weird, but if you've ever used norton it's not going to be any more confusing than that.
i've had just about enough of your vassar bashing.
We'll know it's REALLY bad when/if their name gets changed to Trimmed Micro...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Actually, the verb 'moot' means 'submit for discussion', and has nothing to do with the subject being doomed or fruitless.
Similarly, a 'moot point' is a point that has been raised for discussion, but doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the previous discussion. Similar to a tangent, but tangent implies that there is *some* relation between the tangential point and the original one.
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I, personally, didn't like Solaris on the whole; it's conceptually great, but it's like baby sitting a 5 year old. It whines, won't tell you what it wants all the while refusing to do what you ask of it. It seems that Sun has Not Invented Here Syndrome so much worse than even Red Hat, in much the same way. It's like whenever you want to do something, you have to find out what they have named their implementation of something everyone else uses, then find out the appropriate interface to use. I run Slackware (which, if you aren't familiar with, has been described as 'pure vanilla Unix'), and I'm so used to just going straight to a config file. This puts me at odds with Solaris' philosophy which I think is, "don't worry about how its done, we'll take care of it for you, so long as you don't mind the learning curve that's the same as if we weren't handling things behind the scenes. So, I'm extremely bias in my opinion and I really didn't give it a really fair shot. It had ticked me off from install where I could use my graphics card to install the OS, but on reboot it would crash trying to use this very same card.
At work I have to run RHEL to keep my boss comfortable, and I don't like it for the fact that they constantly build their own interfaces to configurations - but you don't have to use them. Solaris actually stamps the top of their configuration files "DO NOT EDIT THIS BY HAND!"; they don't tell you the appropriate interface to use, they just tell you not to edit it manually. If their custom scripts and such can't parse a config file with all of the user land applications in *nix (although all of theirs are somewhat lacking in functionality - don't bother trying to compress with tar, it can't do it), I'm just not sure how much confidence I have in their product. But, like I said, Solaris and I got off to a bad start which skews my opinion.
I'd say give it a shot. They really do have great documentation online (entire libraries) if you don't mind sifting through it all. ZFS is awesome (I got it running fine once I could get SSH going, a graphics card later), and their community is fairly active and agreeable, IMHO. I just feel like it's Unix, but with all the bells and whistles that someone else decided they would like in their own distro, instead of a toolbox of open-ended applications wrapped up and ready to be customized by you. For me, that works against the beauty of *nix which is simplicity and portability. If you like RHEL or SLED, you might feel very comfortable with Solaris. If you like debian based distros, or working from a command line, you'll probably hate it. If you like BSD, you'll probably be indifferent.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
You said you use SPARC Solaris for your school, where do you go? I'm at Kutztown University in PA and it sounds just like the setup we have here. I'm supposed to be hacking some LISP and ADA for class right now, but I'm working on the box I promised myself I'd have done by the time this semester started (4 weeks ago). I know how it goes :). Give Slackware-12 a shot, if you use Solaris over SSH for your school work, you'll feel right at home. And Solaris sometimes blows up while being patched in my few weeks of Solaris Administration experience.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
KU as well. And yes, I'm quite familiar with SSHing into acad. ;)
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Megadittoez.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
I find your ability to back up your assertion with fact to be very lacking. I do understand that you're under no particular obligation to substantiate your claim, but you must realize that by not doing so you are really not helping to further your argument.
At all.
Kid-proof tablet..
I find your ability to back up your assertion with fact to be very lacking.
What the hell do you want? A 15 page legal analysis? Go read the discussions about this on Slashdot; they contain a lot of the points that are worth mentioning.
When this patent came out (just like the TiVo patent), the idea had been kicking around for many years; I remember being astonished at the time how a company could be so brazen or ignorant.
The actual legal argument is being prepared as people are documenting prior art (the patent should really be overturned based on obviousness, but that's unfortunately hard to do). I hope they'll nail TrendMicro to the wall over this. It's a shame that companies don't face liability for bad patents; if they did, these kinds of patents might cease.
It's simple. You stated that Trend did not invent the category. I asked who did. You waved your hands around. I responded by explaining that hand-waving does not help your argument.
And still, I see you there, waving your hands around.
Brilliance.
Kid-proof tablet..
I believe the poster was referring to the previous Slashdot discussion, the one referenced at the top of this discussion.
Here's a sample:
*waves HAND*
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
It's simple. You stated that Trend did not invent the category. I asked who did.
I did answer your question: I did. And so did thousands of other engineers around the world.
Is that clear enough?