The feud between anti-virus big shots Symantec Corp and McAfee Associates Inc took another twist yesterday with McAfee’s somewhat bizarre announcement that not only does it not use the Symantec code in its VirusScan product, but the lines in question don’t do anything anyway. Symantec claimed McAfee was using its code in VirusScan on July 21. McAfee said It would be clear to any expert examining this code that it performs no function whatsoever in VirusScan, which begs the question of what its doing there in the first place in these day of bloatware. But McAfee says it’s less than 100 lines of code anyway. On this basis McAfee is to petition the court to dismiss Symantec’s claim. The claim stems from a Symantec employee joining McAfee and transferring the contents of his hard disk at home to his hard disk at work at McAfee. He deleted the code when it was discovered on his disk at work and McAfee brought in an expert to examine his system and recover the deleted fragments, which are being given to Symantec. Anyway, says McAfee he joined after the present version of VirusScan began shipping.
