October 8th, 2005
Nessus creator challenging the community
The GPL community has been challenged.
Renaud Deraison, who wrote most of the most popular open source security scanner, Nessus, says the next version will no longer be licensed under the GPL. The source code of Nessus Version 3.0 will no longer be freely available.
He did this, he writes, to save his company, Tenable Security, which he founded around the open source project in 2002.
Deraison, who complained that other programmers have given him little help with Nessus over the years, also said Version 3.0 w ill be much faster, and have other neat features.
The author of Nmap. a complementary open source scanning tool, responded with an e-mail implying that the community could fork Nessus 2.0 in response. The result would be two different tools, one with source code available and one without it, which would be backwards-copatible to Nessus 2.0 but which would go their separate ways beyond that.
To which I say, good.
Nessus is a good tool, but security professionals I’ve talked to say it’s a poor substitute for the proprietary competition. The GPL security community deserves something better, and since Deraison is tired of people freeloading on his work, that means it’s up to the rest of y’all.
Let’s see what you can do.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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