Over the weekend Stuart Hicks emailed the OSI about an odd statement made by McAfee in its white paper on botnets [PDF]:
Taking the bot controller offline may kill a botnet. As a result, many bots use a Dynamic Domain Name System (DDNS) or have a list of backup IP addresses to survive such an event. Bot technology is rapidly evolving, often aided and abetted, unfortunately, by the open-source movement. [Emphasis mine.]
Huh? No justification is made for this statement. No follow-on, explanatory comments are made.
Someone at McAfee thinks that the correlation between botnets and open source is clear, but I am struggling to grasp any connection between the two. Perhaps this is just one more example of McAfee's dubious grasp on reality when it comes to open source. Remember its statement that open-source licensing is a threat to its business?
Consider the definition of a botnet:
... Read moreMcAfee is warning its investors that "ambiguous" open-source license terms are a threat to its business in its latest annual report, as noted on Slashdot. What's the problem? As InformationWeek reports:
McAfee said it's particularly troubling that the legality of terms included in the GNU/General Public License -- the most widely used open source license -- have yet to be tested in court.
This is a massive pile of rubbish. When was the last time your proprietary vendor's license was tested in court? The answer would be "Never" in virtually every case, and there are far more proprietary licenses out there than open-source licenses.
I think McAfee knows exactly what is expected of it with open-source licenses like the GPL. It just doesn't want to comply with them. It wants the software but not on the software's license terms. That's its problem, not the license's.
Updated: Thinking through this some more, are we going to start to see more proprietary vendors throwing around this canard as a way to spook customers? We shall see....
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