What, you mean they have Open Source Antivirus?

So in the open source world the biggest project is ClamAV – not very exciting marketing speak but … there it is, often open source is like that. Just quietly moving along, run by community … there are often paid people if a project gets big enough.

So – say you aren’t using Linux/Unix — and you don’t feel like “compiling your source code” – well there are builds of ClamAV for other operating systems. I’m going to try it out – watch this space.

https://www.clamav.net/

Why am I not going to use a commercial product … well, because antivirus is only a piece of the puzzle and I get a bit sick of “marketingware” rather than software. Nagging you (nagware) to buy it, canceling upgrades if you don’t pay. Some sites are better off if the software will stay installed indefinitely and not keep going to a new version or expiring constantly. Sounds wrong because marketing people want you to think all these new versions and updates are necessary, sometimes they make things worse and downgrade you so you have to pay more to get back functions.

So – as a researcher every year or two I like to test the state of the free/open-source/sponsor only type offerings from the open source community. I believe that ultimately open source makes more progress than paid software for well know same old solutions … we don’t need to keep paying for wordprocessors surely. So we shouldn’t for many other types of software – unless we want to reward innovation.

However – on initial inspection – its more of a command line library that needs additional software to integrate it into Windows. Not really ready to give clients. No wonder its not really making a big impact in mainstream consumer antivirus world … but it wouldn’t take much. I found other IT consultants saying the same thing – “don’t bother with it”. Yet, i’m determined to ” bother with it”. Looking into documentation there is a windows installer that only appears linked there.

https://www.clamav.net/documents/installing-clamav-on-windows

https://blog.andornot.com/blog/How-to-set-up-ClamAV-as-a-Windows-Service-to-scan-file-streams-on-demand/

As well as other unofficial guides such as the latter link above. So as usual with open source software, where there is a will there is a way. Generally you want to avoid trying to write your own installer before you find how it has been done successfully or just to avoid writing code.