Nessus no longer open source

Kirk Strauser kirk at strauser.com
Thu Oct 6 09:16:23 PDT 2005


On Thursday 06 October 2005 11:04, Gayn Winters wrote:

> [...] under the GPL the AUTHOR of the code is not bound by the same
> restrictions that the users are. 

I don't think that's completely true.  The author has copyright over the 
work that they themselves wrote, but it's my understanding that outside 
contributors retain copyright to the portions they wrote unless they 
explicitly sign control over to the authors.

In other words, Nessus would be completely free to remove contributed 
patches, or re-write them internally, but I don't think they're legally 
able to close-source any code they didn't write.

Much ado was made at one point about some scammer or another offering to 
"buy" Linux.  The general concensus is that this would be legally 
impossible without the permission of everyone who'd ever submitted a patch, 
unless those patches were removed.
-- 
Kirk Strauser


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list