The BFC Computing Weblog

After reading about Barracuda moving to invalidate a bogus patent Trend Micro filed for on virus-scanning at an e-mail gateway (many of my clients depend on this technology) in January, I sent Barracuda the following note:

          -----Original Message-----
          From: Bill McGonigle [mailto:bill@bfccomputing.com] 
          Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:24 PM
          To: legal@barracuda.com
          Subject: possible SMTP prior art - TFS
          
          From:
          
          http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.sendmail/
          browse_frm/thread/3cee3dc93ea81690/a8cd75d669fbd6b7?lnk=st&q=smtp+virus+scan#a8cd75d669fbd6b7
          
          Its pretty functional - gateways between any/all MS/MAIL,
          WP-OFFICE, CC:MAIL, SMTP, UUCP, MCI-MAIL. It does uuencode
          and MIME attachments (configurable per address or domain
          wildcard) and international characters. It can also virus
          scan attachments on the way through the gateway, and access
          can be controlled on a user by user basis!
          
          (message dated July 25th, 1995).
          
          It looks like it's still around in some form from foxT:
             http://www.tfstech.com/
          
          Good luck,
          -Bill
          

I never heard back more than a quick “thanks!” from Dean Drako, CEO of Barracuda, but today, I read they’ve moved ahead with this strategy and Goran Fransson, developer on TFS, is a new open source ally.

Dean writes of Goran, “We greatly appreciate the time that Goran Fransson took in coming forward to share this very important piece of prior art,” Drako says. “We believe that his testimony is instrumental in our case against what we believe is an unjust patent claim by Trend Micro against Barracuda Networks and the open source ClamAV project. In our view, Goran is an open source hero.”

Full disclosure: I’ve sold completely open solutions, based on postfix/MailScanner/clamav/sqlgrey against Barracuda’a blackbox appliances, but I’m glad they’re fighting against Trend Micro’s abuse of the system.