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.

Comments

Re:GPL Kool-aid

[Mr. Underbridge]

Free as in beer is cool and all that, but if one excuse for dumping GPL is that they aren't getting any benefits in the way of free code, I guess they weren't really drinking the Kool-aid in the first place, eh?

That's *the* valid excuse. They were in fact drinking the kool-aid - they believed that by contributing to the codebase, that it would make everyone's project stronger. As it happened, they kept giving and the competition kept taking. The community didn't give back.

I agree, though, they could have written a license that gave other companies the right to reuse the code for non-commercial uses only, and that would have been a better compromise.

From their perspective?

[ivoras]

Why isn't anybody looking at it from *their* perspective: A small, young-ish company tried to make a great product but failed to remain financially viable with the GPL license. Free-as-in-speech code is all well and great but at the end of the day, philosophy doesn't pay the bills.

Or is everyone scared that all the "You can't actually make money with GPL" rumours are true (especially for small start-ups)? ;)

Re:GPL Kool-aid

[massysett]

I suppose everyone is entitled to his understanding of the purpose of the GPL, but it was not my understanding that the GPL is about having a community make free improvements to one's software. My understanding is that the GPL is about giving users freedoms, not about community giveback. The FSF seems to agree.

The FSF says nothing about the GPL and community giveback. It says only that the GPL exists to give users freedoms to use and modify software. Indeed, "The freedom to use a program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job, and without being required to communicate subsequently with the developer or any other specific entity." (emphasis mine)

Re:GPL Kool-aid

[Mateito]

I agree - in principle - but principle doesn't put food in your mouth or pay the rent.

These guys did a wonderful job. Six years contributing to software that was obviously so good that other people could make money off it. Its one thing to work on an open source project in your spare time, or to be employed by one of the few companies that can leverage free software to make money, but these guys aren't. So unless you are working on the kernel, on samba or one of maybe a dozen other projects, you can't give up your day job.

Maybe by closing the source, one of their competitors will buy them out and they will have enough money to live on and write open source code. Rather than berating these guys for leaving the fold, thank them profusely for the six years of hard work.

If you don't like it, fork it. Once GPLed, always GPLed, and only V3 and above is going closed.