MPP and Beyond

It seems that most of the articles I read about the Trend vs. Barracuda suit miss or obscure the point so here is my attempt to explain it. Ironically, I discovered Trend’s patent a few years ago and showed it to our IP attorney who agreed that it is ridiculous and that most security vendors are exposed on this issue. Simply put, Trend has a ridiculous patent on the concept of scanning for viruses at the gateway - whether it be for email, FTP, www, etc. It is a broad system patent and should never have been granted in the first place.

Trend is suing Barracuda for the simple idea of scanning for viruses at the gateway. Since Barracuda uses ClamAV, owned by SourceFire, and ClamAV probably doesn’t have deep enough pockets to be interesting to sue, Trend sued Barracuda. Most commercial AV vendors have paid Trend to remove their liability but ClamAV never did. Plus, Barracuda has pissed off a lot of companies (i.e. Trend) for wrecking the low end of the antispam business with Walmart style pricing and a crap product, but that is a different story.

In any case, the central issue is the ridiculous gateway antivirus patent that Trend has. However, Barracuda seems to be in a race to be even more pathetic by trying to turn this into an open source issue with Barracuda as the great defenders of open source. That is a big joke. Barracuda is plenty rich, they have plenty of lawyers and they made a calculated risk to eek a few more dollars out with open source rather than paying some AV vendor a small per-box royalty. They wanted a disruption of the low end, they paid for the marketing to make it happen and they got it, but this is nobody’s issue but Barracuda.

Of course there is the larger issue of software patents but that is a fight far bigger than Trend and Barracuda and far beyond the scope of this rant. I say tough luck to Barracuda and thank goodness that we are too small to be on any radar screen for lawsuits.

Technorati Tags: trend micro, barracuda, antispam, email security, clamav, open source