New Nmap License Draft

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

Hi Everyone.  In this post-SCO-lawsuit world, I decided to formalize
the Nmap license.  Right now it is just the GPL with a few paragraphs
of exceptions and clarifications that I wrote up.  I never spent much
time writing it, nor even had it reviewed by a real lawyer.  The goals
for the new license are:

o Have an Nmap Public Source License which I can just refer to by
  name, rather than having to repeat 93 lines of license text in more
  than 100 source and header files.  This is especially important for
  scripts with the new NSE system -- most of those are shorter than
  the header text needed with the current license!

o Have a license which has been reviewed by an actual attorney to
  ensure that the legal effect is what we intended.  I would also like
  to get it approved by the Open Source Initiative, but that is a
  moderately expensive and time consuming process, so I'd rather wait
  for the license text to settle down first.  I might wait for the
  GPLv3 drafting to be finished as well, so we can decide whether to
  "upgrade" to that version.

o Include some protections which are common to other open source
  licenses, but not the GPL.  For example, this new draft sets the
  litigation jurisdiction as the Northern District of California.  I'd
  hate for someone to sue me for distributing Nmap for free.  And to
  humanity's credit, nobody has ever even threatened to do so.  But if
  that unfortunate day arrives, I'd rather the bastards at least sue
  in my local court.

o Of course, keep Nmap open source.  This new license is still based
  on the GPL version 2.

So with that out of the way, here is my initial (and annotated) draft
of the Nmap Public Source License:

http://insecure.org/nmap/npsl/npsl-annotated.html

Note that Nmap isn't yet released under this license.  It is just a
proposal.  I plan to have it reviewed by open source attorneys, but
haven't done that yet.

Please speak up if you have any comments or suggestions.  The license
is trivial to change now, since it hasn't even been applied to
anything.

For comparision, the previous (current) license is here:

http://insecure.org/nmap/data/COPYING

Cheers,
-F

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