questions regarding new plugin policy

[Renaud Deraison]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 03:42:43PM -0800, Eijiro Matsumoto wrote:
> call me chop suey, but if i read the following legal
> snippet on nessus.org correctly:
> 
> "SUBMISSIONS  (http://www.nessus.org/privacy)

This is the policy of the website (and mailing lists,
submitted white papers, and on-line resources in general).
> 
> does this mean if i contribute a new NASL script,
> Tenable owns it?  

No. If you submit a script, it belongs to you but has to be under the
GPL.

> what if i contribute a NASL script 1 day after tenable
> creates a proprietary one?  does tenable holds on to
> the rule for later release?

Yes.

> what kind of checks and balances exist to prevent
> Tenable from taking a GPL NASL submission and using it
> to create their proprietary one?  It would be easy for
> Tenable to say: "we had one first, so we are delaying
> this for 7 days" -- how does anyone know for sure but
> tenable?


You can submit a plugin to plugins-writers@ for the plugin to see.
The list of the plugins written on our side will be publically 
available through http://www.nessus.org/scripts.php.

Of course there's a small window of potential submission conflicts
(ie: a plugin is submitted while we're working on it), but in the
past there has been very little conflicts.


				-- Renaud