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Nessus 3.0 to abandon GPL licensing

Posted by dave on · 2 comments
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Nessus -- once billed as "the open-source vulnerability scanner" -- is changing its ways as of the 3.0 release, which is expected shortly. According to a recent post on the Nessus Announcements mailing list "Nessus 3 will be available free of charge, including on the Windows platform, but will not be released under the GPL." On its web site, Nessus now just bills itself as "the network vulnerability scanner."

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Comments (2)

tuxchick ·
Closing the source of an important security tool like Nessus puts it squarely on my "do not use" list. It may be that the authors will continue to put out a good product, and they will make more money, and have happy users. But now you can't write plugins, or redistribute it, and apparently can't even use it in a consulting business without permission. Bye, nessus, it was nice knowing you.

Here is a link explaining why they changed the license, it is interesting reading: http://mail.nessus.org/pipermail/nessus/2005-January/msg0018...
r_a_trip ·
Hmmm, OpenNessus anyone? I guess most of the source is still out there under the GPL.

On a scary sidenote, GPL software only seems safe from proprietary aspirations when large indispensable parts are written by people, who are now dead and can't change their mind about licensing...

Free as in free of charge simply doesn't cut it against Free as in speech. Another developer-group that got the wrong impression about Free Software...

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