Re: TrendMicro goes Douchebag

[Florian Weimer <fw () deneb enyo de>]

* Nick FitzGerald:

> As i vaguely recall and from reading between the lines of the above 
> (and other, later, such Usenet posts) MIMEsweeper was originally a plug-
> in for ccMail and some other mail server (and they were working on 
> Exchaneg and other versions, including (eventually) a "standalone" 
> one), BUT you had to set up a separate "dummy" server _which was 
> effectively a gateway_.

It's a bit questionable if innovation consists of taking features away,
for instance by crippling a mail server to support only very restricted
mail routing. 8-) But the patent includes a fairly generic claim on
virus scanning during email transmission (Claim 11).

I don't know anymore if the patent was very innovative in 1995.
Uuencoded transmission on virus-infested PCs was a fairly new thing.  On
BBSes, netmail and files were cleanly separated.  Most people used mail
servers operated by their provider, with individual accounts, which
meant that they couldn't use a gateway solution.  ISPs weren't
interested in virus scanning service, I guess.  The examiner might even
have had doubts about the commercial applicability of the described
technology.

So far, I haven't perceived Barracuda as a free software company.  Their
free software site appears to be unmaintained, the patches and the
distributed software are outdated.  The claim that they only make minor
changes to free software they ship, and that the configuration files are
confidential ("very significant changes to configuration files [...] are
not covered by the open source license agreements and are therefore not
made available").

OTOH, enforcing patents is usually a desperate move because it carries
unpredictable risks.  The USPTO doesn't list any patents assigned to
Barracuda, but this doesn't mean much.  Barracuda could retaliate
against Trend, or a sister company might do so.  I fail to see what
Trend hopes to gain.
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