It reasons like this that I've been praising Panda AV for the last almost year. Not only do they share their info with all their customers, but they had virus definitions already availble to be downloaded for all of the latest big ones, before they hit. (including slammer, SoBig, Blaster, etc)...
I don't quite undertand... how can they have a def out before the virus is out?

It a conspiracy! The AV corps pay people to code, then turn over to AV company to make def. then release to public. Anyone who does'nt pay, gets hit... sometimes softly, sometimes with a cannonball to the stomach. Doesn't the mob use those buiness practices?

I think it is silly of all of you to expect a company to share data that they are spending a lot of money to gather. Running the collection nodes and paying the analysts that are the backbone of the deepsight system is not a cheap thing to do.
Hey... we pay too. So... if they tell their deepsight customers first (say 4-6 hrs) then they should tell their suscribers next (2-4hrs) and then finally the public? LoL That makes no sense at all... they should just tell everyone so everyone can scramble to try to minimize the effects of said virus/worm.

Then again... they should be scrambling to path their systems when the patch is released and tested. Not when a virus/worm hits that can exploit the security hole.