Re: TrendMicro goes Douchebag

["Kyle C. Quest" <kyle.c.quest () gmail com>]

> I'm somewhat offended at the knee-jerk reaction to this entire
> situation...


Then brace yourself... because you'll be offended a lot :-)
With the exception of people who work for TrendMicro
everybody else is disgusted with this because it represents
what's wrong with the patent system.

Obviously, TrendMicro doesn't give a damn if it's ClamAV
or something else or if it's open source or not. They are just
trying to collect money. However, the following statement
(taken from the "most fair and balanced coverage")
can not be taken seriously:

'Officials at Trend Micro said the resolution of the case will not effect
 the development of open-source projects. "Open source is not at the
heart of any issue in dispute, and we cannot see how this case will
have a negative effect on open-source development,"
the Trend Micro spokesman said.'

The bottom line is that if any software steps on TrendMicro's patent
it will suffer, which means that Open Source software will also suffer
and even more than the commercial software vendors because
a lot of people developing Open Source software don't have tons
of money to defend themselves and to pay royalties to vendors like
TrendMicro. This means that if John Doe creates a great new Open Source
gateway software/system that happens to also do AV scanning using techniques
from the TrendMicro patent he will be shut down, which means that any
innovation that could have been introduced is going to die.

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