Customer Power and AV Wannabes · Chapter 1 19 freeware is seen as not only "nobler" but also somehow more efficient. It's true that there have been excellent non-commercial anti-virus programs that have filled a serious gap in the market for a while, but they've either been generic (e.g., Padgett Peterson's "Macrolist" and "Disksecure") or in a niche market. John Norstad's "Disinfectant" for the Mac was a good example of the latter. Even during its heyday, though, Norstad never claimed that it detected all varieties of Mac malware, and he was pretty much forced to retire the program when it became clear that people were assuming that it was a complete solution, even when the mid- 1990s epidemic of macro viruses made that expectation unsustainable for a freeware product. There may still be room for freeware, open source, and so on in many environments. However, there are governance, contractual, and support issues in enterprise malware defense that such products generally do little to address. AV Wannabe The term virus researcher has long been sullied by its association with hobbyist virus writers claiming to be engaged in research. Nevertheless, independent anti-virus researchers have played an important part in the fight against malicious software, and many individuals within AVIEN have contributed to that struggle while working outside the anti-virus industry. James Wolfe, an independent anti-virus researcher with many years experience in enterprise security, asks, "So you want to be a bona fide computer anti-virus researcher?," and considers the roles of and the relationship between the different types of researchers within and