Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:16:19 -0500 From: Kirk Strauser <kirk@strauser.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Nessus no longer open source Message-ID: <200510061116.20222.kirk@strauser.com> In-Reply-To: <058f01c5ca8f$a3ed7730$c901a8c0@workdog> References: <058f01c5ca8f$a3ed7730$c901a8c0@workdog>
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On Thursday 06 October 2005 11:04, Gayn Winters wrote: > [...] under the GPL the AUTHOR of the code is not bound by the same > restrictions that the users are. I don't think that's completely true. The author has copyright over the work that they themselves wrote, but it's my understanding that outside contributors retain copyright to the portions they wrote unless they explicitly sign control over to the authors. In other words, Nessus would be completely free to remove contributed patches, or re-write them internally, but I don't think they're legally able to close-source any code they didn't write. Much ado was made at one point about some scammer or another offering to "buy" Linux. The general concensus is that this would be legally impossible without the permission of everyone who'd ever submitted a patch, unless those patches were removed. -- Kirk Strauser
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