Hi, I work for McAfee in the US on the commercial side, these comments are mine and I am not representing my employer here but I feel compelled to correct some of the misleading or simply wrong things that have been said.

Point 1 - McAfee don't know what A perpetual license means.

A perpetual license is precisely what the name implies, it is the right to own the software that is licensed perpetually, it is not the right to own other software outside of the license. TVD or Total Virus Defence is an un-managed suite - by that I mean there is no central management - updating is done by Virus Scan. AVD or Active Virus defence is a managed suite - containing the additional value of a product called ePolicy Orchestrator or 'ePO' - so the question is sould somoene who has paid for TVD be given the extra componants that are in AVD for free? Obviously not - if you own a BMW 3 series would it be reasonable to expect a free upgrade to a 5 series?

The truth is that McAfee have a migration route from TVD to AVD - this is at a fractional cost of the full suite and is intended to add the value of ePO to the TVD suite at a reasonable cost whithout forcing the client to pay out a whole bunch of money to duplicate what they own already - fair enough?

If you are not getting a straight answer out of your McAfee rep then ask to speak with his/her manager we try our best but we are after all human and error is a human trait. What we are NOT is dishonest.

Point 2 - AV is AV I would urge everyone to take a look at the excellent paper on Essential Trends and Dynamics of the Endpoint Security Industry http://www.zeltser.com/endpoint-security-trends

The report quite nicely gives an insight on the dificulties facing the smaller AV companies - IT security is as someone alluded to a very research and bandwidth intensive business and the bars to entry are very high - AVG was mentioned as one AV product that is free for personal use, the difficulty that Grisoft have is that it costs lots of $$'s to innovate and develop a product that is effective against threats these days and to put it quite simply AVD is not that well developed - I would challange anyone who has been running AVG for a length of time to install one of the big 3 - McAfee, Norton or Trend and take a look at what is found - 9 times out of 10 there will be something significant that AVG missed. Additionally all of the big AV companies offer free virus removers without any registration or cost. A very well respected AV testing outfit is the university of magdeburg in Germany http://www.av-test.org/ they will give a very detailed (perhaps a little too detailed) view on the performance of the top 20 AV products on the market.

Point 3 - $7 million on a sales getaway? Come on this is just simply untrue, the truth is actualy the other way around there is such a massive drive to reduce costs to reach the profit targets we have given to Wall street that we are having to forgoe a lot of the usual expenses and tighten our belts enormously - I can unequivebly state there is no $7 million sales junket.

Point 4 - us Linux folks don't touch McAfee with a bargepole.