>On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 15:18 -0400, Mercer, Jeff wrote: >> I suspect that's something Renaud hopes would actually happen, i.e. >> this change may inspire people to contribute major code. Often, folks >> who are capable of contributions won't bother if someone else is >> already doing it. In other words, Renaurd could be considered a victim >> of his own productivity, :) >All you can do is *suspect* as there was no call for participants, no >public shouting that more input is needed to Nessus.
Huh? Have we been reading the same list? It's certainly not been a topic every single day, but Renaud has brought up the issue of Nessus contributions more than once. >The decision was made by Tenable, apparently without consulting the >people they wanted to help them. Shouldn't the first step have been >to ask for help if help was what was required ? a) If it's an open source project, there's nothing to stop folks from volunteering. b) Per the point I was making, Renaurd has been the primary contributer to the Nessus project. This is not at all unusual, most open source projects have a tiny number of major contributors. Even Firefox is the work of only a small core group of coders. c) Renaud has said in his recent messages to this list that the main reason for not open sourcing Nessus3 is there's been no significant contributions to the project AND they are tired of supporting their competition which unethically uses Nessus without acknowleding such. >You'll notice that there are now a couple of groups considering forking >the code, because they feel it's important to them. And that's fine with me. >They *might* have contributed rather than forking if this had been >requested of them. You've just proved my original point. Folks were too lazy to contribute as long as someone else (i.e. Renaud) was doing all the work. Now that he's not going to contribute to the GPL Nessus anymore, they are forced to get up and do some work. Or are you saying people are impossible of volunteering without constant harassment? >Then again they might not have, the point is there was no attempt from >Tenable to ask for what they wanted. I strongly disagree with that statement. Nessus started as an open source project, BEFORE Tenable existed. There's been many years now for folks to contribute. While there's not been an "adoption" campaign like with Firefox, Linux, etc, Tenable has made it clear that contributions are welcome. >Merely being GPL is not a enough to create a successful OSS project, >you have to invite the help. Some OSS projects don't like outside help >and actively reject anything that comes their way through arrogance, I >don't believe Nessus has, but unless there is an open invitation and a >plea when code is scarce people won't know there is a shortfall. I'm on >the User/Devel/Plugin/Announce mailing lists and didn't notice any >pleas for help. It's about the Tenable business model, not lack of contributions. Tenable is a company that makes money off of appliances that uses Nessus. So they hire programmers to work on Nessus. They've decided to write a bunch of proprietary code and create a new version of Nessus and not GPL it. In other words, the code has ALREADY FORKED. It's not a big deal, because no one can rightfully say that Renaud or others at Tenable are obligated to continue to contribute to Nessus. What would have happened if Renaud just quit writing code and decided to become a tree surgeon, and Tenable went out of business? Nessus would be in about the same state it's going to be in now... _______________________________________________ Nessus mailing list [email protected] http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus
