Benjamin Tomhave wrote:
Additionally, am wondering what assurances have been taken to ensure that ideas contributed to the open-source Nessus project over the years are not incorporated into the commercial version that is to be released under a closed license? GPL covers more than just code - it covers ideas, too.
I'm afraid that's not true. In our current economic system ideas are only covered by patents, which do not apply (in some countries, fortunately) to software. So Tenable is free to take "ideas" from the Nessus community and use it in whatever form they wish. If you were talking about code itself, I would agree, they would need to contact each and every contributor to the code to ask them to relicense their patches. Either that or remove the patches, and start with code that is entirely the copyright of Tenable (or Tenable's employees) and use that for the basis for a non-free product. The issue here might be: is a one liner patch considered copyrighted by who wrote it? What length does a patch to the code significant enough to require Tenable to contact the contributor before using it in a non-free product? This issue was not brought up by plugin contributors when Tenable change the license of some plugins, BTW. Even though they had contributed (before the license change) to what they though were GPL plugins. In any case, I guess that whomever has concerns with this and believes that the license change is a violation of _his_ copyright should bring this issue up with Tenable directly instead of through this list.
Would hate to see a commercial product deployed that included ideas generated by the FOSS community...
I don't believe that's an issue. I actually think that ideas should freely flow between both camps. Code, however, which was licensed in one form needs to be relicensed to go through that barrier, and the legitimate copyright holders of the code can do that. Regards Javier _______________________________________________ Nessus mailing list [email protected] http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus
