Open source antivirus program gets commercial twist

ClamAV still available as open source but also offered under commercial support subscription

By Ellen Messmer, Network World, 12/13/07

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The open source ClamAV antivirus program, the rights to which were acquired by Sourcefire last August, now is being offered under a commercial customer-support subscription model (compare antivirus products).

Mike Guiterman, director of open source projects at Sourcefire, says that Certified ClamAV Support, which includes round-the-clock support for a binary version of ClamAV for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Sun Solaris Sparc, costs roughly $600 per year, per server. The commercial-support model is intended for ClamAV used on a server gateway to filter e-mail malware, he says.

Sourcefire also says both the subscription-based version and open source code will include two new software modules developed by Sourcefire for monitoring certain types of data. The Data Loss Prevention modules are designed to detect inbound or outbound credit-card or Social Security numbers.

Open source ClamAV will continue as a community-support project with updated antivirus signatures, on which Sourcefire will depend for the commercial version. Guiterman says the main reason for introducing the commercial customer-support version is to satisfy the federal agencies and enterprises that use ClamAV, especially in their laboratory environments, but which are facing management demands that commercial source code be used.

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