We have a commercial product, which we want to keep commercial. It's some email server software, which has the capability to run an external virus scanner (currently it supports several commercial virus scanners)
We tend to either use commercial components, or truly free components (lua, sqlite etc) rather than GPL ones, because GPL is such a minefield - but, unfortunately, there don't seem to be any truly free virus scanners around.
We've been considering adding support for our server software to use ClamAV (which won't be distributed with the software, and which won't be necessary for the operation of our software) for scanning emails as they pass through it (as it currently can do with Sophos, avast!, Panda etc)
There are several possibilities I've come up with:
- add support for our software to either load libclamav or talk to clamd directly, if those things are installed. This seems to me that we'd then need to make our software GPLed - which isn't acceptable for us
- our software supports 'shim' DLLs with a standard interface which can talk to a third party antivirus product to add the capability for more virus scanners without recompilation. WE could make one of those to talk to clamav instead. That shim DLL could then be GPLed without a problem for us. But, then, because our email server software would dynamically load the shim, which is GPLed, our server would have to be GPLed as well... Again, not acceptable.
- we could, simply, not support ClamAV :-( But then, someone else might come along and write a shim for it - they'd have to GPL the shim - then because our software would dynamically link to it, would our software need to be GPLed??
(Is talking to clamd different from loading libclamav? So, if we talk to clamd using TCP/IP would that infer the GPL requirement or not?)
Paul VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pscs.co.uk/
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