Sourcefire announced today that they acquired the open source antivirus application called ClamAV. This news conveniently comes just one week after ClamAV was ranked one of the best antivirus applications for the Linux operating system. It even beat out almost all of the commercial solutions that were available.
Here’s what Sourcefire had to say about the acquisition:
With nearly 1 million unique IP addresses downloading ClamAV malware updates daily across more than 120 mirrors in 38 countries, ClamAV is one of the most broadly adopted open source security projects worldwide.
…
The ClamAV team will remain dedicated to the project as Sourcefire employees, continuing their management of the project on a day-to-day basis.
Sourcefire is best known for their open source Snort application that has been around since 1998. It’s used to perform packet logging and real-time traffic analysis on networks to detect and prevent of intrusions. It also supports the scanning of packets using *drumroll* ClamAV!
Don’t worry though, ClamAV will remain open source and will still be actively developed by the core team. Overall, this has got to be a good thing because the project will now have the engineering and financial backing of a much larger organization.
Note: ClamAV was created to work with Unix-based computers, but there is also a Windows version available.
ClamAV FAQ’s Regarding the Acquisition
Sourcefire FAQ’s Regarding the Acquisition (PDF)
Sourcefire Announcement and Press Release
Source: CyberNet Forum (Thanks Richard!)
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Tags: Freeware, Software, Acquisition, Antivirus, Downloads, Linux
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It’ll be good to have more development capital behind it, but I wonder how the project will be funded in order to make a profit now. Either through advertising or subscription, I would imagine; neither of which appeal to me.
I’m curious to know if the Windows version is being done by the ClamAV people or if it is an independent project, and how up to date it will be kept. I know how some projects like this can be slowly let go as the developer loses interest or gets too busy on other things. The virus definitions already appear to be 6 months out of date, but maybe it’s a typo.
Any ideas if it works on Vista? It only says XP and 2003. Who wants to be the guinea pig? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Well this is certainly a surprise to me. After reading “It also supports the scanning of packets using *drumroll* ClamAV!” it makes a little sense. Well here is looking out a full GUI for ClamAV on Linux systems.
If it is going to be kept open source I don’t think that they would put any advertising or anything in it. I have a feeling that Sourcefire wanted the patents and technology behind ClamAV more than anything.
It’s a project done by a third-party. I haven’t tried this on Vista myself, but it looks like it was working on early Vista builds just fine:
http://www.ogasawalrus.com/blog/node/13
There is an official Win32 port of the project available here: http://www.clamwin.com
The one based at http://win32.clamav.net runs on the command line interface I believe whereas the ClamWin port provides a GUI if that’s what you need.