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SpamAssassin

Matts on 2003-01-07T10:47:17

Today I found out that NAI (Network Associates - makers of McAffee anti-virus and various other things) have just bought out DeerSoft - owners of the trademark "SpamAssassin" and employers of Justin Mason and Craig Hughes - the creator of SpamAssassin and another one of the developers respectively.

Unfortunately for me this creates a conflict of interest. NAI, a competitor of ours is now using code I created, and will continue to do so.

Looks like my development on SpamAssassin ends here. Shame.

What happens to your code?

VSarkiss on 2003-01-07T15:24:51

Were your code contributions under GPL or Artistic License? If so, what do those licenses call for when the company is bought? Does NAI have to keep it open or re-write it if they want to close it, or ...?

Not trying to be difficult; I really don't know and I'm curious. There was an article on Slashdot about the purchase, but there wasn't a lot of informed or informative comments when I looked.

Re:What happens to your code?

da on 2003-01-07T17:00:16

"COPYRIGHT: SpamAssassin is distributed under Perl's Artistic license." ...according to its manpage.

I will confess to being a bit nervous about Spamassassin's future as a NAI property.

Business model

gnat on 2003-01-07T22:03:29

Interesting. The trademark is probably the most valuable acquisition they made, if the code is open sourced. I wonder whether the FSF should be recommending that free software projects have names with trademarks owned by the FSF, to prevent IP abuse.

--Nat

Re:Business model

Matts on 2003-01-07T23:09:10

I would venture to suggest the employees they gained are more valuable.