Tenable license discussion - Nessus engine

[Jason Haar]

Robert Keith wrote:

>So, the direction for Nessus seems to be:
>  1.  The majority of the plugins will be proprietary to Tenable.  There is
>no real room to have any real involvement by an open-source community when
>the submissions will compete (and  push-come-to-shove loose to the Tenable
>submissions), so the future of Nessus plugins will be to support Tenable
>activities
>  
>
I don't think that's the only path...

As far as I'm aware, you could do what happened in Snort when SourceFire 
was formed, and the official development became done by the Sourcefire 
group. Namely, start a "bleeding edge" subset of plugins. I don't think 
Tenable would have any issues with that? Better watch those "equivalent" 
rules don't look like they were cut-n-pasted from Tenable's feed of 
course! ;-)

So you could have the "officially sanctioned" plugins from Tenable, and 
"bleeding edge" plugins from the Open Source community. And those who 
care about quality will stick to the Tenable ones ;-) [not to slight the 
Snort Bleeding edge stuff - hell - I contribute to that! It's just their 
False Positive rate is a lot higher due to the sorts of stuff their 
rules look for, and they are more interested in getting rules out that 
detect the bad things than in quality control]

-- 
Cheers

Jason Haar
Information Security Manager, Trimble Navigation Ltd.
Phone: +64 3 9635 377 Fax: +64 3 9635 417
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