IANAL, but having spoken to sources in the FOSS legal community, it is very much an issue. If someone had, for example, submitted an idea to the list for a future improvement, in good faith as an open source product, only to find that idea rolled into the now closed source Nessus 3, or worse, into a commercial-only version, then that could be established as theft of intellectual property. Submission of ideas to this list carries an implicit permission for use within the GPL product. Any ideas submitted prior to Renaud's announcement of the license change for the core product should likely be considered tainted wrt any commercial products they've developed, barring explicit permission from the idea author to use it within a commercial product.
Your assertion is also incorrect about patents. US copyright law protects all ideas, not just those patented. This is one of the main reasons that software patents are so hotly contested - they're largely unnecessary. Bottom line, it's something that hopefully Tenable has discussed with their general counsel. Would be curious to hear their assurances on the subject. --- Benjamin Tomhave, CISSP [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://falcon.secureconsulting.net/ "We must scrupulously guard the civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred is a wedge designed to attack our civilization." -President Franklin Delano Roosevelt > -----Original Message----- > From: Javier Fernandez-Sanguino [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 4:20 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: followup Qs on license changes > > 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
