On Sun, Mar 02, 2003 at 02:07:02AM +0100, Johannes Rohr wrote: > Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > > Personally, BTW, I would really, really prefer to maintain Free > > > Software, not *only* for political reasons but also because a > > > commercial vendor is obviously the least responsive upstream you can > > > have. And also, not having access to the source really sucks badly > > > (even if for non-hackers like me)! > > > You suggested considering alternatives. So far I haven't heard of any > > > free-as-in-freedom virus scanner, let alone a production-quality > > > one. Did I miss something? If yes, please let me know! > > Have you looked at the packages amavis-ng and clamav? I've heard good > > things about these DFSG-free virus tools, but haven't tried them yet > > myself. > amavis is already in Debian. It needs a third party virus scanner to > work. Also clamav is already in Debian. (I never heard of it > before.). So now I can choose either to abandon my one and only Debian > package or to continue supporting non-free software, although a free > alternative is in development. > I just visited the clamav home page. They say they are using virus > data from openantivirus.org (of which I never heard before.). At > OpenAntivirus.org they refer to their own software as Alpha quality. I > don't know if this applies to both binaries and virus data. > Well, I'm quite surprised that such an initiative as openantivirus.org > exists. I thought we would need production-quality viruses for > GNU/Linux first. But both under openvirus.org and freevirus.org I get > a "host not found". Hey folks, we're lagging behind! How can GNU/Linux > ever become ready for the desktop like that? ;-) It's been pointed out to me in private email that the Open Antivirus database has fared rather poorly in testing, compared with other virus scanners; see http://agn-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/vtc/en0212.htm for one account. So there may still be a need for non-free virus scanners under Linux; or you might choose to focus your efforts on improving the quality of the OpenAV database. Either way, there's certainly enough work around that you needn't resort to being "just a user" if you don't want to. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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