Nessus 3.0 discussed

An anonymous reader writes "Nessus is one of the world's most popular (open source) vulnerability scanners, used in over 75,000 organizations world-wide. Many of the world's largest organizations are realizing significant cost savings by using Nessus to audit business-critical enterprise devices and applications. With the recent news of going closed source Ron Gula took a few minutes to talk to SecurityFocus. From the article: 'I speak to a lot of different open source project managers and they say similar stuff -- it's mostly free users and not really code contributors.' What would happen now? Nessus 3 will provide an average 5x speed improvement compared to the old, but open source, 2.x version, and a lot of new features."

Comments

Re:GPL resistance?

[fpu]

Fyodor (author of NMAP) posted about Nessus going closed source in the nmap-hackers mailing list some weeks ago. It seems that Teenable's main point is not GPL-resistance from the enterprise customers, but rather the fact that there has been almost zero code contributed to Nessus, and that by providing its source, they were helping a lot of companies that could be classified as their competitors. I, for one, can see their point, even if I am a strong advocate of free software (free as in FSF, not OSF).

However, as has already been stated, that does not mean this is the end of free Nessus -- it will still be free, except we no longer will be able to look under the hood. Since many of us automate Nessus directly through the command line client and parsing of NBE files, I believe that this will impact very little even power users.