Nessus no longer open source

[Charles Swiger]

On Oct 6, 2005, at 12:04 PM, Gayn Winters wrote:
> "Nessus 3 will be available for many platforms, but do understand that
> we won't be able to support every distribution / operating system
> available. I also understand that some free software advocates won't
> want to use a binary-only Nessus 3. This is why Nessus 2 will
> continue to be maintained and will stay under the GPL."
>
> I'm not sure if Nessus 3 will be supported as a FreeBSD package.

Probably not-- if the new license for Nessus 3 forbids commercial  
redistribution, then we won't be able to provide a package.  However,  
the FreeBSD ports system has options to handle software which is  
under a restrictive license or distributed only as a binary.

> [ ... ] The thing that seems germane
> to the FreeBSD community is that ports, even extremely popular  
> ones, are
> vulnerable, since under the GPL the AUTHOR of the code is not bound by
> the same restrictions that the users are.  I'm not a lawyer, but as I
> understand it, the author can create a derived work of something under
> the GPL and license the derived work (a "rewrite" in the case of  
> nessus
> 3) and arbitrarily restrict it.

The author or copyright holder of software has the right to  
redistribute their software under other terms if they wish to do so;  
this has nothing to do with the GPL in particular, or even with  
creating derivative works in general.  (One creates a derivative work  
when someone other than the original author makes changes to a work.)

However, the GPL'ed version of the software, in this case Nessus 2,  
remains and will always remain available under the terms of the GPL.   
The decision to open source software is not revokable in that sense.   
People who are not happy with the direction Tenable is going with  
Nessus 3 could fork Nessus 2 and continue to develop it, if they  
choose to do so, with or without further contributions from Tenable.

-- 
-Chuck