On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 07:47:04PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > Tenable Network Security claims this relicensing never happened for > the plugins. (I've asked them.)
Plugins were never distributed under any other license, for all contributors to the Nessus project the "Nessus Script License" was just the GPL. Upstream (Renaud) made this clear in the mailing lists a couple of times. Nobody from upstream has spoken up saying that whomever (pre-2.2.2a) was distributing these plugins was not doing it correctly. Renaud (and Tenable) were very much aware that Debian, FreeBSD as well as other commercial Linux distributions (like SuSE) have been providing Nessus and all its plugins in their distributions for quite some time. Certainly, if they had any issue with that they should have brought it out a long time ago. The fact is, some plugins in the new release (2.3) as well the new plugins that are being produced have been relicensed, plugins in previous releases have not. Debian is still distributing the old releases. I'm not sure if I will be providing new releases but when I do, only plugins that are free in that release will be included. If upstream has failed to add a proper license to the plugins then they should fix it properly. Many plugins code (even in the 2.3 release) refers to the "Nessus Script License". Feel free to check out the (free) GPL feed which is available at http://www.nessus.org/nasl/all-2.0.tar.gz. You'll find a number of plugins licensed under the "Nessus Script License", including some of those you are interested in. The new license restrictions do apply to the "feeds" of nessus plugins (what you can download from the Internet). People downloading new plugins will need to register to the feed if they want the full list of plugins. If you are using the nessus-update-plugins script from the 2.2.2 release you shouldn't be able to download plugins you have not registered for (since those are distributed through a different mechanism and you need nessus-fetch for those) and you will only get the free "GPL feed". Hope I have cleared this up. If you still believe otherwise feel free to bring this issue up in Nessus' public mailing list. Regards Javier PS: Who have you asked at Tenable? Maybe they should clear this mess up.
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