On Apr 16, 2010, at 1:30 PM, Giampaolo Tomassoni wrote:
Then that is their choice and when it fails, they can bitch to the
developers of that system and switch to another vendor .......
Apart the fact that open software is not yet-another-vendor. It is a
culture.
No, ClamAV is a VENDOR that happens to be part of the open software
community.
So ClamAV should obey to the rules governing the open-software
community.
One is that everybody is free to run it own copy of the software, in
whichever shape he/she likes it.
And you are free to do so, just as the developers are free to release
signatures that do not work with older versions. That is ALL that
happened. In doing so, clamd fails to be able to properly read the
database and fails.
There have been numerous pieces of software that I have used over the
years that have died on the vine and no longer suitable for new
systems. Do I rant at them that they MUST provide me with a new
version, no, I deal with it. Either building my own from sources or
moving on to a new piece of software.....
This is not a matter of missing upgrades. This is a matter of
proactively
breaking running systems.
They didn't, YOU did. You failed to properly configure your email to
handle a failure in clamd.
Were there many others like you who also failed to configure their
systems to handle a failure in clamd? Yes, but that again was their
decision as it was yours.
Jim, you keep adding apples and pears together. Aren't you starting
feeling
the importance of what the ClamAV team wanted and let happen?
Yes, they were concerned that new signatures coming out are not
compatible with older versions, stated so, and sent one of them out.
You would be in exactly the same situation next month.....
The fact that they made a conscious decision to not have separate
signatures was THEIR decision to make and YOURS to ignore.
The way the clamav team managed this case hits the open software
community
as a whole, being the ClamAV project a well-known member of that
community.
Yes, but not necessarily in a negative way...... One of the MAJOR
problems with Microsoft software is their insane insistence on
backwards compatibility. Sometimes it does not make sense to do so
and
you just have to bite the bullet and let people know it will not
work.
In Microsoft's case they simply fail to let people know...... in
addition to breaking it.
This is a good point of view which I can easily endorse. But we are
still
speaking of stopping working systems. We are not speaking about
introducing
a backward incompatibility.
Yes we are, we are speaking of signatures that can not be handled by
versions older than 0.95. They decided to forego compatibility just as
YOU chose to ignore their warnings. And before we get back to "I
didn't know", as judges are quick to point out, ignorance of the law
(or in this case changes coming down the pike) is no excuse.
We are not trying to say you shouldn't feel bad about it sneaking up
on you, but that does not change the fact that the ClamAV team put out
notices 6 months ago that this would happen.
Giampaolo
Jim
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