Interesting interview with the CEO of Trend, Eva Chen at PC World on the Barracuda patent infringement suit that Trend has brought. A couple of things are pretty clear reading Chen's responses to the questions:

1. This law suit is being fought as much in the court of public opinion as it is in the courts of law.  For that Dean and the Barracuda crew deserve credit. They have done a good job of making this a Trend versus open source community suit.  From Chen's answer it seems Trend was taken totally by surprise by Barracuda's aggressive PR and their ability to turn elements of the open source community against Trend.  The pity for Trend is that Chen actually does make clear the difference between just Clam AV being a virus scanner and the way Barracuda uses Clam AV as part of the gateway. If they would stick to that and not about who makes money from it, they might be able to get the open source community to leave this one alone.

2. In Trend's view this is not about open source  but about money.  I think Chen shoots Trend in the foot with this argument.  She seems to say that because Barracuda is a for profit company that is why they are suing them. If ClamAV was making money, they would sue them too is dangling metaphor there. Here is what Chen says, "But we were not suing ClamAV. Barracuda is a for-profit company. They are taking ClamAV, putting it on their gateway and making money out of it. It's not free software that we are suing, it's Barracuda." So it is all about the money than. If ClamAV was making money Trend would sue them too?

3. After already suing and winning against IBM, McAfee and most of all Fortinet, Trend is very confident that their patent is the real deal in a court of law. If the Xie brothers couldn't find anything to throw this out, they are not worried about the likes of Dean Drako.  But as I said, while litigating this Trend is taking black eyes and body shots in the public opinion arena every day.

4. The last thing they want is to get Sourcefire involved in this suit.  You can't tell me that at this stage of the game Chen would not know if they have cut a deal with Sourcefire or not, the owners of ClamAV. Yet she plays as if she never even heard of them and would have to ask her lawyers. I suspect this is because they think that Sourcefire has more open source "chops" than Barracuda and this would turn this thing into a PR disaster for Trend.  It could be this same reason that played apart (I think is the big reason) in Barracuda bidding for Sourcefire.

In any event it will be interesting to see how PR and public opinion play in the eventual outcome of this suit.