[Gllug] microsoft buys gecad/rav antivirus

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 04:11:54AM -0700, james_middleton at hush.com wrote:
> 
> hello. hope you don't mind me contacting the gllug list like this but
> i was wondering what you guys thought about MS buying GeCad and the Rav
> antivirus product. 
> 
> i don't know how many people use RAV or what the Linux community thinks
> of it, but maybe some of you use it either at home or at work and there
> is a very real possibility that MS will discontinue the RAV product for
> Linux and Novell and focus soley on Windows. how will this impact the
> Linux community, if at all? 

We chose RAV at my last-but-one job to run our email service's AV
(http://www.postmaster.co.uk & http://www.schoolmaster.net - I haven't
worked for them for a while, so I don't know if they are still using
RAV). We chose it simply because it had the right price structure, per
server, NOT per user. And it integrated well with Exim on Linux.

Alternatives like the Sophos-based packages all price per user, which
works out very expensive. Their prices seem to be based on corporate
licensing, ie. tens or hundreds of pounds 'per seat', which is totally
inappropriate for ASPs and ISPs. Schoolmaster charge only a few pounds
per user per year because that is all that the schools market will
support.

If RAV stop supporting Linux, then they will effectively destroy their
userbase. Everyone runs mail servers on Linux because it's cheap and
doesn't crash. We used Baltimore's AV product for a while which ran on
NT and was a constant source of nightmare. Just that one server
accounted for more than half of all pager messages. Usually it just
stopped responding and we had to get the Red Bus monkeys to reboot it.

As for its impact on the 'Linux community' however, I think precisely
nothing. There are lots of other AV products which run on Linux, so
the loss of one of them, albeit the cheapest one, won't make much
difference.

> ps. please reply to james_middleton at hush.com as i'm not on list. 

I've replied ON-list too, because this is a discussion list, not
just a place to get questions answered for free!

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London) and Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
"One serious obstacle to the adoption of good programming languages is
the notion that everything has to be sacrificed for speed. In computer
languages as in life, speed kills." -- Mike Vanier

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