Nessus no longer open source

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Dinesh Nair [mailto:dinesh at alphaque.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 12:35 AM
>To: Ted Mittelstaedt
>Cc: gayn.winters at bristolsystems.com; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: Re: Nessus no longer open source
>
>
>
>On 10/07/05 03:57 Ted Mittelstaedt said the following:
>> would have been prevented from using it.  Almost certainly
>the research
>> in the
>> vulnerabilities that go into Nessus 3 will trickle into Nessus 2
>> eventually.  So
>
>however given that the nessus author(s) said that one main
>reason was the
>lack of contributions from the community, who is going to maintain the
>nessus 2 codebase and plugins ?
>

The authors, of course.

Stand the problem on it's head.  Where are the Nessus people going to
find customers for Nessus 3?  From Nessus 2 users.  If they let the
Nessus 2 codebase go to pot then people will stop using it, and they lose
a valuable source of sales leads.

Talk to the marketing manager of whatever company you work for and
ask them how much it costs to market and advertise your product.
The Nessus company has a perfect advertising venue available with
Nessus 2 it is cheaper for them to keep it maintained in order to get
customers than to try to launch and ad campaign.

The only problem right now that Nessus has is that Nessus 3 is new, so
it's not yet differentiated enough from Nessus 2 for people to be
convinced to pay the money for it.  But as time passes and they keep
working on Nessus 3 that will change.

Look at the Sendmail Inc. model, it is -very- successful.

Ted