Slashdot Mirror
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."
That maybe this is a betrayal of the Open Source and Free Software initiatives that we hold valuable.
I'm poor, so I know that I'm going to be flamed into Hell. But I don't care. These people closed source on something that open source proponets need, good, network admistration tools.
Money be damned. They hurt the F/OSS cause doing this. Whether they owned the copyright to Nessus is beside the point. This was a serious set back that will take those of us who use F/OSS Software months and possibly years to recover as we have to go through the trouble of creating an OpenNessus, or FreeNessus or GNessus, and then fight potential legal battles against the closed Nessus because it might hurt the close Nessus's legal battle.
Not to mention those security holes that could potentially go undetected in Linux because of the falling behind of the Closed Nessus's progress. The ripple effects of these actions by the Nessus creators will serve to weaken the overall community.
The hardest part will be finding the qualified people to start the Open Nessus. So, we are looking at two years of fallback.
I hope these guys are proud of themselves.