[Mimedefang] NAI buys Deersoft
David F. Skoll
dfs at roaringpenguin.com
Tue Jan 7 10:19:01 EST 2003
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.
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