Black Wolf Technologies

A friend ICQ’d me the article today. The original article about the lawsuit is here. What the fuck? Here’s the quote that gets my blood boiling:

The issue is Trend Micro’s patent on ‘anti-virus detection on an SMTP or FTP gateway’.

Patents are dumb, IMO. Especially when it comes to software, networking and security. So what if Barracuda makes money using tools that were developed for free? Their prices reflect that, and their customers are aware of it. I’ve personally used the Barracuda spam and IM firewalls in a consulting gig a year or so ago. They’re basically cheap rack-mount hardware, running Linux and SpamAssassin/ClamAV/eJabberd with an interface and some reverse SSH backdoor stuff for their support.

I’m a capitalist at heart, but every time I hear about things like this, it bothers me inside. I hate when decisions are made based solely on money. But it’s also the patent thing. I’m always confused as to how a simple idea like putting AV on an FTP or SMTP gateway is patentable. The people in the patent office must not understand technology very well, since this is a pretty logical step if you’re protecting an enterprise. This almost seems like a form of patent trolling, where a company (likely a bunch of lawyers) gets patents on a bunch of ideas and then aggressively sues companies that infringe on those patents.

Patents of this nature fuck up development of new technologies, since patent holders can do almost nothing with the patented idea whilst preventing others from doing so. Bah.

Tags: Anti-Virus, Barracuda, ClamAV, Open Source, Spam, SpamAssassin, Trend Micro

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Backdoors, Host Intrusion Detection Systems, Host Intrusion Prevention Systems, Insecure File Operations, Linux, Malware, Network Intrusion Detection Systems, Network Intrusion Prevention Systems, SSH. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.