Deersoft announces its existence

[Posted June 12, 2002 by corbet]

A press release hit the wires on June 12: a new company called "Deersoft" was announcing existence as a spam-fighting company. Deersoft, as it turns out, is an attempt to commercialize SpamAssassin, a highly effective, free spam filtering system.

SpamAssassin is certainly a good base to start with. We first started using it here at LWN some months ago; as one might imagine, LWN's public email addresses get substantial amounts of spam. SpamAssassin filters out the vast majority of that spam (though, we notice, its hit rate has fallen a little recently) with almost no false positives. The SpamAssassin developers have provided us a real service.

Deersoft is following a reasonably common strategy for companies built around a free software package: offer a value-added, proprietary version of the program. In this case, Deersoft is selling "SpamAssassin Pro," which brings SpamAssassin's capabilities to Microsoft Outlook. A 30-day demo version can be downloaded from the company's web site.

The idea of charging Outlook users as a way of supporting SpamAssassin development has a certain appeal. There is, however, a considerable list of contributors who were, it seems, not asked whether it was permissible to distribute their code under a proprietary license. SpamAssassin is licensed under the Artistic License, which is a little vague on just when this sort of distribution is allowed. LWN has talked with a couple of people who have contributed code to SpamAssassin; they recognize the significant role that Deersoft principal Craig Hughes has taken in SpamAssassin development and seem to not begrudge the use of their contributions in this manner.

One hopes that development of the free version of SpamAssassin will continue. The press release makes encouraging noises in that regard:

Craig Hughes makes his ongoing dedication to the open software community clear, "Deersoft is committed to supporting the open source community, and is pleased to announce the release today of SpamAssassin(TM) 2.3.0."

The lack of an actual 2.3.0 release on SpamAssassin.org as of this writing, one presumes, is just the result of some last-minute delays.

Free software companies have had a hard time since the bubble burst; it really is harder to make money when the code is freely available. SpamAssassin is a great counterexample to the often-made claim that free software can only imitate, not innovate. Wouldn't it be nice if it also helped provide a good example of a successful business built around free software?