So what drives the folks at McAfee to do this?

Maybe it is the same thinking that drives programnmers to not want to write code.

"Don't reinvent the wheel."

"Code reuse."

"Use a shared library or a scripting language with batteries included."

Why crawl the web when Google has already done it for you?

And so on.

Personally, I do not have trouble understanding why McAfee would do this.

What I have trouble understanding is why OSVDB would think they could crawl some public data and then charge a fee to access it.

It is the "sale" of "free" information that puzzles me.

By all means go ahead and try, you may well recoup your outlays for compiling the free data and even make a profit.

But should we really be surprised when someone does not want to pay?