On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 04:14:52PM -0500, George Theall wrote:
> From my reading, this license would seem to prevent anyone but Tenable
> from changing Tenable's plugins (point ii, under "No Reverse
> Engineering; Other Restrictions"). For example, fixes such as those
> Martin O'Neal is wont to make on plugins-writers and my recent
> modifications to ssl_funcs.inc appear to be technically in violation of
> the license.
>
> Is this correct? Is it what Tenable desires?
The idea is to prevent a very common practice done by many ASPs
subscribed to this very list who routinely do the following :
for i in *.nasl
do
cat $i| sed 's/Nessus/SomeCompanyName/g' > $i.new
mv $i.new $i
done
It's very difficult, legalese-wise, to prevent the above practice AND
to have an open policy regarding the plugins.
That being said, what will happen _in practice_ is that you can make
a patch privately and send it to me (ie: "playing by the rules"),
and either it is :
- a trivial patch. In that case I'll apply it (reminding you that Tenable
keeps the copyright on the plugins)
- a substantial patch and in that case the plugin will fall into the GPL
world.
Now, if you are Joe ASP and you take one of our plugins and make it more
effective and not submit your change, then you're not really playing by
the rules and you're in violation of the license.
I understand that what defines "trivial" vs. "substantial" is subjective.
And I understand that, unfortunately, making patches will be a slightly
more blurry practice than what is used to be, but that's the price to
pay to force some people to play "fair".
-- Renaud
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