Open sauce spat boils over
Strong words shouted about ClamAV
Wednesday, 30 January 2008, 08:58
BARRACUDA Networks has covered itself in open sauce in a patent spat with Trend Micro over ClamAV.
Trend has asked Barracuda to remove ClamAV from its products.
Barracuda declared: “Trend Micro's actions are a blatant abuse of the U.S. legal system. Since Trend Micro is a consumer of free and open source software we call on Trend Micro to drop these attacks."
Eben Moglen founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, said in the Barracuda press release: "Collective defence from software patents is a shared responsibility for everyone in the free software ecosystem."
ClamAV was originally developed by Tomasz Kojm in 2001. ClamAV was acquired by SourceFire, the company that created SNORT, in August 2007, the statement said. µ
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The patent claim made by Trend Micro is not aimed at open source software particularly. It happens that Barracuda does use some open source code in its product, but the lawsuit would be exactly the same if all the code were proprietary.

The fact that Barracuda does use open source just makes it a little easier for them to ask the open source community for help uncovering prior art to fight the patent infringement claims. But those claims are not against the open source code.
Trend Micro could lose from corporate customers that buy Barracuda's kit. I can see why they wouldn't want that to happen.

Makes you wonder why the other AV companies haven't filed patent infringements. Either against Barracuda or each other. Maybe they don't mind infringement from each other as long as they don't cut out huge swaths of licensing revenue from each other.

Cheers,
John