Tenable license discussion - Nessus engine

[Renaud Deraison]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 12:22:52PM -0800, Robert Keith wrote:
>   2.  The core Nessus system will become proprietary Tenable (as alluded to
> by Renaud's remarks to this message).

No this is false. What I alluded to is that if you distribute binaries
of Nessus, you must be careful to what you link it to.

ie: if you use intel's C compiler to compile Nessus and in the end
nessusd is not linked against the glibc but the intel'c C library (which
is not open-source), then you're linking a GPL'ed software to a
proprietary library which is not part of the base system, and
redistributing such a binary is in violation of the GPL (otherwise there
would be a pretty nasty loophole in the GPL: just make all your
modifications in an external library and call it from within nessusd).

Hence my remark: if you distribute binaries, you probably want to check
with us if it's OK to do so before you do it.


				-- Renaud