What is the best 100% free Anti-Virus?

[turbo]

I wrote applications in dBase and compiled them afterward so they would run faster. I only charged the businesses for my time, and I always gave them the uncompiled source-code for free so that they could hire someone else to modify the programs if necessary. I had no complaints and my business was growing very quickly through word-of-mouth, but I was burning out - sometimes coding 14-16 hours a day. I passed that business on to another programmer (with my entire client list) at no cost to him and moved on to a job that allowed me to work more reasonable hours.

 

[Crosson]

Hey Turbo-1, I think I understand your point of view.

I was writing software in the mid '80's. There was no Internet and no pool of collaborators.

There was an internet, and the free software movement was already underway, but I agree that free software was not a choice for your job back then.

If you can find a way for me to get paid for writing code for free software, please steer me to it. I'd be thrilled to get paid to write free software.

Here is a place to start:

http://www.fsf.org/resources/jobs/listing

There is no free lunch.

In a sense you are right, but in 2008 I can use my computer hardware with complete freedom, and no cost.

 

[binzing]

Completely disregarding what I said, eh?

 

[K.J.Healey]

What part of my hardware am I missing out on using windows? What exactly is being restricted? Is there some feature I am not getting that I could with linux?

Im not being an *** either, I am serious. Is it because windows/mac limits an independent applications access to hardware and core-operations? I had an old sunos system. My old P2 was running at any given time Linux (redhat 5 i think), Beos, and some other one i couldn't remember. Basically at the time i was extremely disappointed due to the lack of developed drivers for the most basic of hardware, and so I went back.

I love openoffice, firefox, etc and use them daily. (more like by the second). And even started developing (or trying to) my own plugins for firefox. But I still feel its rare to find a decent product that has had that much effort put into it like those. Most "free" applications seem to fall into disrepair and end up as ditched projects.


On a side note about "free" I still feel like its OP usage was ok. Here comes a delicious analogy.

If someone offers you an oreo, and you take it, was it a "free cookie"? Or was it not truly free because you were not offered the freedom of choice of whatever you wanted (a softbatch most likely). Depends on how you look at it. Maybe it wasn't a free cookie, but it was a free oreo.

You didn't get "free software" you got "a free limited usage non commercial virus scanner".

 

[Defennder]

He was using the word "free" in a different sense:

What[/PLAIN] is Free Software?
“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

 

[B. Elliott]

I use both AVG and Ad-Aware2007 and always put both on peoples computers that I work on.

 

[Crosson]

Completely disregarding what I said, eh?

Not at all. Notice that communication in this forum is asynchronus; I did not see your lengthy reply yesterday.

Yeah, cause I'm not so literal. (OCD/borderline autistic if you ask me...)

It is choice to blame a diagnosis and accept your shortcomings, or instead you could work and practice to improve your own ability to use language.

I'm sure there's plenty of open sourcers (the one's who actually do this stuff) who aren't as literal

Not everyone is as careful in their usage as I am, but I am far from being alone on this issue:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Since when does software, or the people that make it, give a damn about the "freedom" of the user?

This is one of the core reasons why people release software under free software licenses.

Here is a website from a free software programmer who is creating a CD Ripping / Encoder application. When you read that, do you see that he cares about the freedom of the users?

And this man is? Yourself?

I was thinking of Stallman, the man who "in 1983 launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

Stallman thinks it is a good idea to use the term 'free software' only for software that respects the freedoms of the user, as I have recommended in this thread.

You recommend against preventing viruses, therefore you want people to get viruses? Cause, unlike human lives, neither virus programmers, nor AV companies care about how many computers get "killed"...

No, I said I recommend against virus scanners. To prevent viruses, I suggest getting educated about computers. Configuring a firewall and using smart practices is sufficient protection even for users of Windows XP. There really is no way to get a virus other then by making obvious mistakes.

What did you learn from the last virus you had?

As turbo said, there are PEOPLE who RELY on this for INCOME, it is they're LIVELIHOOD. Now, if you have the money to pay all of the programmers better than they're closed source, corporate employer, do it! By all means.

I don't, but other people do, which is why you are using firefox, openOffice, etc. Mozilla and IBM both PAY people who RELY on INCOME.

I don't even understand why you are arguing about whether people can make money from free software. The fact is that they do.

What part of my hardware am I missing out on using windows? What exactly is being restricted? Is there some feature I am not getting that I could with linux?

Why doesn't windows recovery have an option to save an image of my hard drive as .ISO and restore from it at a later time? A perfectly exact image, that I can burn on a series of DVDs, so that as soon as my main windows partition goes haywire I can put the disc in the machine, restart the computer, and come back to a fresh install with all my programs installed and settings configured exactly how I want them.

This would be convenient for the user, but the answer is that we can't have it because MS is worried that we would use it for piracy. Fortunately I can do this with Linux, and I can even use Linux to do this to someones Windows partition (but doing so breaks the licenses of most windows software).


Another feature linux has is called a package manager. This is a program that is built into the OS, that when you open it has a list of 20,000 freely downloadable software utilities. To install software, you just select the packages you want with a check mark and click 'install', then the downloading and installing happens automatically with absolutely no further bothering you. You don't have to click through a pointless 'installShield wizard', and you don't have to use the internet browser to go to a website and find the page to download the executable. All this is possible because the software is free.


Another problem with windows is that it is not unix. For its first 20 years, Unix was a supercomputer OS because personal computers could not handle the truly secure, multi-user, multi-tasking, behemoth back in the early eighties. I have a dual core laptop, and with linux I can run four HD 720p videos at once smoothly. You can encode video while you work and visit the web with no loss of performance. I can use the arrow keys to control a fullscreen video, and pause/fast foward etc with millisecond latency, making it easy to catch freeze frames. When I found my laptop could do this I played with it for a few minutes, since I had never felt so directly in control of any machine; a freaking stopwatch has higher latency.

 

[las3rjock]

There is no free lunch.

If we accept Crosson's definition of "free," then this statement is a tautology.

 

[binzing]

It is choice to blame a diagnosis and accept your shortcomings, or instead you could work and practice to improve your own ability to use language.

No, its not a shortcoming, and just to piss you off, I'll keep using it.

 

[Crosson]

If we accept Crosson's definition of "free," then this statement is a tautology.

I understand that you are all against me, and so it doesn't matter to you that your joke completely misunderstands the meaning of the term 'free software' in the sense of freeSoftwareFoundation.org (fsf).

The fsf does not recommend changing the meaning of the word 'free' in general, only as it applies to software. Therefore they, nor I, have any position on 'free lunches' on the basis of what I have written in this thread.

The main point is that free implies freedom, and so a lunch is only free if it comes, not only at no cost, but also with 'no strings attached.' This is why your joke fails so miserably, it is very easy to conceive of situations where lunches do not grant the eater freedom:

"Let me buy you lunch, and then you will be my slave forever."

Since we can imagine a lunch that is not free in the sense of freedom i.e. this is not a contradiction, it is wrong to say that lunch => (not free) is a tautology.

No, its not a shortcoming, and just to piss you off, I'll keep using it.

Ultimately the chain of reasons must come to an end, and the foundation reveals itself to be a primitive reaction.

 

[turbo]

Crosson, the goals of the fsf that you keep citing are a pipe-dream. It's comparable to the philosophy of the hippie movement in the 1960's that claimed that everything not nailed down ought to be free. These are people who wanted to be given stuff without working or paying for it because of some vague "idealistic" standard that other people had to adhere to to support them. Sorry, but that is crap.

As a former software developer, I valued my time and talents, and I needed to get paid a fair wage so that I could heat my home and so my wife and I could eat and pay for gas so that we could commute to our jobs (many of my clients were 50-75+ miles away). If you wish to enslave yourself writing "free" (by your definition) software and giving it away, knock yourself out, but please realize that for individuals, software that is "free for personal use" is FREE.

I could out-extreme you and claim that you have to accept a lot of constraints (power, phone, cable, PC build, Internet connectivity standards, HTML standards, etc) in order to use your "free" software, but I won't bother. Irony is lost on the faithful.

 

[NoobixCube]

All I can add to this thread is it has got way out of hand and in turn been hijacked ...
AVG for the win :D

 

[loom91]

I don't know why no one has mentioned this, but Crosson's writing has a strange quality, distant and dream-like, at once alluring yet alienating. He seems in exquisite command of the language without ever dominating it.

turbo, since you were writing code long before the computer scene took its current shape, it is probably difficult for you to appreciate the strange and unique things internet is doing to the world around us. Today it is indubitable that the free software thing works. It needs more time to oil the gears, but the fact that impossibly idealist things like it do work in practice is clear when you look at Wikipedia. The concept of Wikipedia simply cannot work, except that it does.