ClamAV bought by Snort vendor Sourcefire
Get good results in one little bake-off and you get bought out?
Sourcefire , the little company behind the open source Snort intrusion prevention has just acquired the open source ClamAV anti-virus project:
“Sourcefire has acquired the ClamAV project and related trademarks, as well as the source code copyrights held by the five principal members of the ClamAV team. Sourcefire will also assume control of the ClamAV project including: the ClamAV.org domain, web site and web site content; and the ClamAV Sourceforge project page.”
Congratulations to the ClamAV team! They’ve been building the product as a volunteer effort since 2002.
According to the announcement , the product will continue to be open source and licensed under the GPL. More importantly, they promise to keep the malware signature database database open as well.
However, when Sourcefire was created to take Snort commercial they changed access to the IDS signatures from free for all to a tiered structure : $500 per year for real-time updates, and free-but-registration required access to the same rules after a five day delay. The urge to monetize the widely used ClamAV beyond just selling support services for it will be irresistible, and Sourcefire will probably do so in a very similar way to Snort.
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One Response to “ClamAV bought by Snort vendor Sourcefire”:
August 17th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Excellent news!
Whatever there is no malware database in ClamAV that is web browsable.