[GNUz] Moving ...

[Wesley Parish]

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 10:54, Jim Cheetham wrote:
> On Oct 15, 2005, at 9:33 AM, rik-Xandros-test wrote:
> >> That could be the IDS system Nessus
> >> http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/06/1853248&tid=172&tid=117
> >
> > Is that "/exploiting a loophole in the GPL/" or just plain
> > unscrupulous?
>
> Neither, by a long shot.
> The company owned the copyright, and therefore have the right to
> license under any terms they liked.
>
> Despite being GPLd, the community had not submitted any significant
> patches or functionality, and therefore the code was not jointly owned.
> This meant that no-one else had to be consulted about the license
> change.

It's not the first time it's happened.  The Mosix project was released under 
the GPL, then the owner of most of the code took it proprietary:
http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/
"openMosix is the GPLv2, Open Source, project to extend the outstanding MOSIX 
project.  New releases of MOSIX became proprietary software in late 2001 and 
openMosix was begun February 10, 2002 by Moshe Bar to keep this highly 
regarded Linux Clustering solution available as open source.
 openMosix quickly acquired an international team of volunteers that captured 
prior releases of the GPL code and started to immediately improve and extend 
the solution.  Users worldwide have adopted openMosix to protect their 
investments and extend their clustering operations."

Apparently there's some people doing the same thing with nessus:
http://www.subterrain.net/drupal/blog
http://www.subterrain.net/drupal/nessus-3.0-abandons-gpl-licensing-gnessus-fork-launched
"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." It is worth noting that Tim Brown has 
already created a fork called gnessus based on the latest GPL'd release of 
Nessus. This is what happens when a company bites the open source hand that 
feeds it."

>
> Contrast with the Linux kernel - there are so many copyright holders
> involved in that collection of code, any relicensing would have to get
> agreement from every single one of them (even the ones that are
> uncontactable). This is seen as a level of protection, because Linus
> cannot "go bad" without rewriting huge portions.
>
> On the other hand, it will probably prevent the kernel from moving to
> GPLv3, for the same reasons ...
>
> -jim
>
>
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-- 
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
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