Re: Another new worm???

[crispin () WIREX COM (Crispin Cowan)]

"Michael W. Shaffer" wrote:

> I am evaluating a variety of
> antivirus and content filtering products, but while perusing dozens of
> informational, research, and link sites concerned with viruses I have not
> found even one link to any sort of open source scanning engine project.
> There are a number of things (AMaViS, et.al.) that claim to be 'free
> virus scanners', but they all seem to amount to nothing more than wrapper
> scripts that rely on one or more commercial scanning engines to do their
> work.

One thing that Dan Schrader was very correct on is the amount of work
required to MAINTAIN an AV product.  With hundreds of new virii and variants
each week, someone has to do a lot of work to keep the profiles up to date.

Mysteriously, the commercial AV vendors seem to have their economic model
backwards:  they charge $ for a closed source application, and then give out
the AV profiles for ever.

Open source AV would seem to put this exactly the opposite way:  the AV
program would be open source, but you would end up paying a subscription fee
for the continuous profile updates.  Doing it this way is fulling in keeping
with the RMS vision of free software:  the software is free, the service is
not.  I do not believe that an AV profile database could be kept up to date
on a volunteer basis.

Dan:  do you have any comment on why commercial AV vendors charge for the
initial product and give away the service, instead of the other way around?

Community:  would you pay a subscription fee for updates for an open source
AV product?  Or would your management try to get by with only buying
occasional updates, i.e. right after they get hacked? :-)

Crispin

--
Crispin Cowan, CTO, WireX Communications, Inc.    http://wirex.com
Free Hardened Linux Distribution:                 http://immunix.org