Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 01:34:06 -0400
On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 22:07:19 EDT, security curmudgeon said:
Nessus has been open source for a long time. Despite that, the majority of contributions have come from a very small amount of people. Even with plugins, some 95% (i think) were written by the Nessus team, not outside contributors.
At least for some people (including myself), software verifiability and transparency is important. I've never contributed code to the Nessus tree, but the availability of the source so we can tell what it's *really* doing has been important more than once. And there's philosophical appeal in the idea of a product being open-source, and software company business models organized around consulting/support contracts (see Sendmail Inc or Red Hat for example). Having said that, I don't particularly insist that it need be a *GPL* license. Most of the OSI "Open Source" licenses would be acceptable (and in fact, I've dealt successfully with more than one project where the source was "available but closed" - Dan Bernstein isn't the only guy with his style of licensing). Of course, the fact that the Nessus 2.2.5 tree is *already* GPL means 2 things: 1) Tim is totally in his rights to start a fork - if anything, the right to fork the tree is one of the primary rights under the GPL. 2) The Nessus crew can't easily un-GPL the code either. The most practical way to do that would be to release a Nessus 3.0 that shares absolutely zero of the code, and under whatever new license they want. All in all, instead of a fork, I'd rather see planning to make sure somebody is ready to take over stewardship/maintenance of the code when Tenable finally wants to get out of keeping the Nessus 2.X tree.
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Current thread:
- Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Tim Brown (Oct 10)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner sk (Oct 10)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner security curmudgeon (Oct 10)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Valdis . Kletnieks (Oct 10)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Vincent Archer (Oct 11)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner MadHat (Oct 11)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Tim Brown (Oct 15)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Tim Brown (Oct 15)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Valdis . Kletnieks (Oct 10)
- RE: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Adriel Desautels (Oct 11)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Thierry Zoller (Oct 11)
- RE: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Adriel Desautels (Oct 15)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Morning Wood (Oct 11)
- Re: Call to participate: GNessUs security scanner Barrie Dempster (Oct 11)
- Nessus becoming closed. [was: Call to participate] trains (Oct 12)