Microsoft has confirmed that it will not develop future versions of GeCAD's RAV antivirus software on the Linux and Novell platforms.

The company said that it will only use the intellectual property belonging to GeCAD, which it bought earlier this month, on internal development for Windows, although it will maintain existing service level agreements with current GeCAD customers.

"We will be honouring existing agreements but there will be no new development outside of Microsoft," said Hillary Wittmann, security marketing manager at Microsoft.

"That goes for commercial and open source software. GeCAD engineers will be focusing on the development of Microsoft's antivirus engine."

But the software giant was unable to say whether it would be releasing virus signature updates in the future. Without regular updates to deal with new threats, antivirus software is useless.

David Routledge, managing director of Parmenides, which was a GeCAD partner, said: "We were informed within the space of a few hours that GeCAD would be ceasing production of its software and that we were to stop marketing RAV but to carry on selling it until we are told to cease."

The sale came out of the blue for all GeCAD partners which, according to Routledge, was kept quiet because it would be obvious that it would drop its Linux and Novell product lines.

"There is no way Microsoft is going to develop products for the competition," he said.

Charles Zealey, manager of IT Solve, also a partner of GeCAD, added: "RAV was a very popular product and was definitely the cheapest solution for Linux because it was sold on a per-server rather than a per-user basis."

He said that RAV was "technologically sound and that Microsoft had gone after a good company in terms of product".