This will be old news for some but after doing more research I thought this would be worthy of a post. Now I know you first question will be “pank, why do you even bother with a virus software on your Mac? Your a smart guy, you take precautions, plus there are no viruses in the wild that affect OS X!” My answer is very simple… I just feel better having virus protection (even on my Mac).

I’ve been using virusbarrier from intego.com for years and truly love the software. I’m currently running X5 and when I saw the updated X6 release my first thought was to just do the normal thing for me and update my software to the latest version. I’m glad I didn’t just jump in like normal and decided to do a little research first. What I discovered that this is expire-ware, meaning that after 1 year the software itself will no longer function. No, not just your virus definitions will expire but the software itself will simply cease to run. This is a horrible marketing change in my opinion and is the “only” reason I will not be upgrading to virusbarrier X6. I’ll just keep my old X5 running and I still have 271 days of virus definition updates. Not to mention when my definition updates do actually expire my old software will still continue to function.

You can easily do some searching for yourself and see that this is their new way to market/sell their software. It is also included in their notes: on the purchase page.
Screenshot: from the bottom of this page

Their excuse for this is that people do not normally keep their virus definitions up to date and thus put themselves at risk so they have taken that risk away. Personally I’d rather make that decision for myself rather than purchasing software that will completely be useless in 1 year unless I re-purchase again. Not to mention that their suite also includes their firewall software. So does that mean that not only your virus software will no longer work after 1 year but also your firewall software will go down as well? From all the reading I’ve done this appears to be the case as well.

As a company I have supported in the past I truly hope they see the error in judgment and listen to their customers concerns. At this point I’m going to assume that many people will be in for a nasty surprise in 1 year since in my opinion intego goes out of their way to “NOT” reveal this on their site. “IF” they are going to choose to do this it needs to be in black and white and VERY clear before any unsuspecting customer purchases their software.

Who knows, maybe they will re-think this or maybe not. Maybe I will no longer be able to purchase virus definitions only for my X5 version and if that is the case it may be time to look into clamxav.