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Nessus Closes Source
JBOD writes "As reported at news.com, the makers of the popular security tool Nessus are closing its source code. Although it will will remain free as in beer, Nessus is dropping the GPL license for the upcoming version 3 of the software. The problem appears to be that Tenable Network Security (the company which primary author Renaud Deraison founded around Nessus) isn't making money because it's competition is simply repackaging their product. Deraison's writes "A number of companies are using the source code against us, by selling or renting appliances, thus exploiting a loophole in the GPL. So in that regard, we have been fueling our competition, and we want to put an end to that." He also notes that the OSS community has contributed very little to Nessus in the past six years, so they were reaping no benefit from using the GPL." Update: 10/06 22:48 GMT by CN : Nessus' Renaud Deraison wrote me to let me know that the company is "good money-wise," but has become annoyed with competitors repackaging their product.
Either the developer is understating the community involvement or he wasn't that good at drumming up interest in community involvement.
Or maybe the community couldn't give a damn about helping until it's an underdog project competing against an evil proprietary product? Some people are more motivated by zealotry than improving the world...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
I think that, sooner or later, the OpenBSD team will come up with some security tools of their own. After OpenSSH, OpenBGP, and OpenCVS, perhaps it is time for OpenNessus?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
youre a zealot dipshit if you believe its always the fault of the dev, never the licence
God damn you. 15 years ago no one gave a shit what was open source and what wasn't. if you found source code, you rejoiced and used it. otherwise you LEARNED HOW TO DO THINGS. who cares that we have .net and java that can turn out a fully functional program in 25% of the time. have you seen the source code for most of these programs? pretty shitty in my experience.
These people don't understand how to performance enhance their code. Example: the linux kernel. Open source and exteremely buggy for the first 9 years of its life. It just recently became a halfway decent competiter. Now tell me why it takes 9 years for linux to mature and a team of 12 can release an entire os in a few months. Tell me why there still hasn't been a decent open source desktop/windowing system replacing X, yet a single developer can write a preemptive multiprocesser os with a GUI and a primitive userland in a few months.
Open source is not a movement. If someone wants to release their code, fine they can. Don't sit there and hawk on people for changing their philosophies. In an application I am developing right now, I have no plans to release the source code. I know my program is of good quality and I will let people pay for the priviledge of using it. Later when I've made a significant amount from it, then I'll release it to the wild for the vultures. If I see a few vultures reselling my work, and other vultures are flocking to them.. you better believe i'll cut those vultures off and make them pay me premium for my work.
In closing, go smoke a choad with rms.