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As you mentioned, MSE is free. Don't like it? Join the club. But AV software choices are like banks - you will find that every one of them has a hate-club. And it's hardly fair to expect AV companies that are independent of OS companies to give away their software based on your logic.
Using that same logic, your home security should be free, right? Because the people that built your home should be 100% responsible for it's security? Even if you leave your doors unlocked? And your car? Is the manufacturer responsible if it's stolen or items are stolen from inside? They took the time to build an electronic key much harder to bypass than the old metal keys, but then you left the doors/windows open or left your keys with a "trusted" valet... is that the manufacturer's fault?
Clearly there are instances where the manufacturer has to accept some level of responsibility - like a lock that fails to work, or the case of the Ford van keys that weren't unique allowing van owners to start other people's vans. And OS providers clearly have had bugs that leave us vulnerable. And they fix the ones that are reported (though some faster than others). But I don't see how they can be responsible for every stupid action that someone takes. You open an unknown attachment from an unknown sender, get infected and that's the manufacturer's fault? Is it their fault when you contact that guy in Nigeria to split the millions that he's safely siphoned and trying to move to a US bank? What about when you turn off your firewall? We each have our own responsibilities - the manufacturers have to accept theirs and we have to accept ours.
On a similar note - all security comes at the cost of convenience. MS could block you from opening or running your email attachments that it "thinks" are bad, but then you will lose the convenience of opening attachments that are actually safe but detected as being potentially harmful. Some thing with every website you go to (with all of the script that runs on it), every application you launch, and everything you do on your system. Seems to me that MS tried to do that with Vista and the backlash was horrendous. It's a no-win situation - the extra security comes at a cost and convenience/access comes at a cost. Ever hear of the Patriot Act 
That's my two cents anyway!
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Two reasons this would never happen, both related to profits:
- The virus makers wouldn't make any moneys from selling their AV software.
- The software makers would have to make programs without bugs - which in turn means their users wouldn't have any incentives to buy next year's "new and improved" upgrade.
Sorry, that's very tongue in cheek, but I've been having this feeling for at least the last 10 years.
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Marc,
I will respond with why I gladly pay for AV software:
1) Those companies, in order to do a decent job need to pay their developers
2) I want something that works, and actually finds viruses, prevents me from accidentally downloading the wrong thing (about 2 times per year, in the old days, the "download" on SourceForge was an Ad, and I clicked on it)
3) I want it up to date
4) I want it to protect my network from the other users who are not nearly as paranoid as I am.
It is not a bug that Chrome lets you download and run an install, answering yes to all of the prompts. It is not a bug in the OS, and not a bug in Chrome. It is misguided of the user to trust something that has not been scanned. So, I choose to have it scanned automatically. And I gladly write a TINY Check, every year or two for the ease.
In perspective. My time is worth $150/hr to me. If I spend $50/year/pc (and I have 6, including some VMs I protect) then that is 2hrs/year of my time. Which is WAY less than the time spent dealing with a single mistake.
I wish we did not have to have them running. I wish people didn't write viruses. But wishing and hoping aint getting the job done!
Finally, I think if you disconnected from the internet, turned off the networking, and carefully monitored the software you did install. You would NOT need AV software. And you would probably not do too much with the computer either.
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Unfortunately, there is no such thing as bug-free software unless the application is quite small, which for most developers will rarely be available in any of our toolsets.
An operating system, no matter which one you target will always have bugs in it. They are software applications that are built by "committee". Except for the original DOS, which Microsoft purchased, no popular, successful OS has ever been developed by a single individual. As a result, though the attempts made to reduce and\or eliminate defects will be profound, no such effort will ever be entirely free of them.
AV software, which is also complex by its nature, attempts to rectify this short-coming in the way OS's are developed. Most do an admirable job of it. And right now they are a needed factor to protect our machinery.
When robots create our OS software, maybe then we may not need such protections but even so, maybe their AI will be faulty. It would have after all been developed by Humans. At least initially...
To address the idea of free software as many seem to propose, there is a terrible downside to such a prospect and its consequences can be seen reverberating throughout the IT profession.
"Free Software" is only as good as the incentive to build it and there are few such products that are well-developed merely as "labors of love".
We all have to eat and put dinner on the table for our families, amongst other things in current Capitalistic societies. If all software were actually free, than the underpinnings of our profession would collapse. People write software not only out of a creative spark but also because they want to build something that works and can provide them with a career outside the confines of corporate employment. Such a desire is quite critical (and would be eliminated if there was no way to monetize it) to many of us and it is doubtful that few who do really want to create their own works want to simply give it away if they are functioning adults on their own and have little interest in working with a group that only charges for software maintenance; something that individual developers who want to have their own business are not in a position to do.
So the next time someone proposes that software should be free, maybe you should suggest that they "live on love" and see how they like paying the bills with it...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Hmm... OK, fair enough. Then if I go eat bad food (the 'other' guys) and it makes me sick then I shouldn't have to pay my doctor, right? After all, it wasn't MY fault so I shouldn't take responsibility for having it fixed? That is, essentially, what you're saying here, isn't it?
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Marc Clifton wrote: Because of bugs in the operating systems and applications that we do pay for.
I need more qualification to agree to that.
The ability to install software on a computer would seem pretty necessary. But when someone clicks on something that they shouldn't and it ends up installing something malicious it doesn't require any "bugs" to do it.
Now when they do that inside a demilitarized zone and that software then uses a bug in some older software to spread itself in the network, even though the users of the internal network made an informed decision to not update the software because it was in a safe zone is that also due to a "bug"?
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Good luck creating all that free AV software mate.
You're going to have a blast.
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Programs that require a reboot, fine. Programs that FORCE a reboot ("your computer will shut down in 10 minutes, please save your work"), well, that software gets immediately removed, never to be used again by me.
And of course, the frosting on the cake was, after it rebooted and there was a new version of AVG, I tried the "speed up your computer" thing and AVG crashed.
Gone. Removed. Good riddance, AVG.
I used to use Avast years ago, trying it out again as a replacement. Don't really feel like paying for Kaspersky (they don't seem to have a free version) and don't really trust something with Russian sounding name anyways. And no, I don't think anti-virus software is something one should have to pay for.
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: And no, I don't think anti-virus software is something one should have to pay for.
It's a brave man who comes to Code Project and suggests that developers shouldn't be rewarded for their work! It's that kind of thing that turns developers into virus makers in the first place!
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Member 9082365 wrote: It's that kind of thing that turns developers into virus makers in the first place!
Are you implying that open source software is virus? 
Marc
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You may very well think that ... I, of course, couldn't possibly comment!
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Member 9082365 wrote: kind of thing that turns developers into virus makers in the first place
While there still may be a segment of the virus creators who do it because of emotional dysfunctions of one sort or another, I think the vast majority today have a purely economic motive.
They are in it to steal from you, everything from your computing resources (CPU cycles, disk space, and network bandwidth) to your economic identity. They are well-paid professionals in a gray market business. I've lost count of the number of stories I've seen in IT news relating how companies use malware techniques to promote their business (Sony comes to mind).
Software Zen: delete this;
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Here, Here !!!
See my reply to the "AV software should be free" section above...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Marc Clifton wrote: And no, I don't think anti-virus software is something one should have to pay for.
Same should apply to condoms.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Same should apply to condoms.
Amen to that.
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: And no, I don't think anti-virus software is something one should have to pay
for.
I have to ask why not?
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Marc Clifton wrote: . Don't really feel like paying for Kaspersky (they don't seem to have a free version) and don't really trust something with Russian sounding name anyways.
Good call. Our company put Kaspersky on our machines and nearly everyone had a problem with it blocking something and slowing everything down. Luckily, most of us could uninstall it.
Terrible.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Do you even need AV at all?
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He will now! 
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harold aptroot wrote: Do you even need AV at all?
I wondered about that. It did maybe once a year pop up with some malware threat discovered.
Marc
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I stick with Microsoft's own Security Essentials, even knowing it's rated rather poorly these days.
Frankly as far as I'm concerned, as long as I'm not running without an AV altogether, and it's lightweight enough to do its thing and leave me alone, that's really all I want. I keep my systems up to date and like to think I'm following common-sense practices, and I've yet (in my 20+ year career as a software developer) to have a virus actually running loose on any of my own machines.
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Marc Clifton wrote: And no, I don't think anti-virus software is something one should have to pay for.
Can you elaborate on that ? How should AV companies earn money then ?
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By accepting bribes from malware makers, duh
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Marc Clifton wrote: And no, I don't think anti-virus software is something one should have to pay for.
I'd word that a bit differently...
"I think operating systems should be built securely enough that they don't need 3rd party anti-virus software."
Contrary to popular belief, nobody owes you anything.
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Mike Mullikin wrote: I'd word that a bit differently...
Exactly. See my other post replying to the mass of "why free?" questions I'm getting. 
Marc
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