[Mimedefang] NAI buys Deersoft

[David F. Skoll]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Matt Bruce wrote:

> Erm... Yeah. I realised the less than ideal wording after I hit Send. I
> had meant to imply that once big vendor acquires a popular (i.e.
> advocated) product it usually all goes awry.

Unless I'm mistaken, NAI has not really acquired SpamAssassin(tm) as
in the Perl module Mail::SpamAssassin.  That code has many more authors
than just the Deersoft people, and they would all have to consent to
NAI's buyout.

>From what I understand, NAI has bought Deersoft's glue code that hooks
SA into Exchange and Outlook, and also rights to the SpamAssassin(tm)
trademark.

SA-the-code is still dual-licensed under the GPL and Artistic license, so
if NAI gets stroppy, it will just be forked, just like SSH/OpenSSH.

The wildcard is if NAI decides to patent something in SpamAssassin.  I
doubt it would hold up, but it could cause trouble.

Regards,

David.