On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 15:18 -0400, Mercer, Jeff wrote:
I suspect that's something Renaud hopes would actually happen, i.e.
this change may inspire people to contribute major code. Often, folks
who are capable of contributions won't bother if someone else is
already doing it. In other words, Renaurd could be considered a victim
of his own productivity, :)
All you can do is *suspect* as there was no call for participants, no
public shouting that more input is needed to Nessus.
Huh? Have we been reading the same list?
It's certainly not been a topic every single day, but Renaud has brought up
the issue of Nessus contributions more than once.
The decision was made by Tenable, apparently without consulting the
people they wanted to help them. Shouldn't the first step have been
to ask for help if help was what was required ?
a) If it's an open source project, there's nothing to stop folks from
volunteering.
b) Per the point I was making, Renaurd has been the primary contributer to
the Nessus project. This is not at all unusual, most open source projects
have a tiny number of major contributors. Even Firefox is the work of only a
small core group of coders.
c) Renaud has said in his recent messages to this list that the main reason
for
not open sourcing Nessus3 is there's been no significant contributions to
the
project AND they are tired of supporting their competition which
unethically
uses Nessus without acknowleding such.
You'll notice that there are now a couple of groups considering forking
the code, because they feel it's important to them.
And that's fine with me.
They *might* have contributed rather than forking if this had been
requested of them.
You've just proved my original point. Folks were too lazy to contribute as
long as someone else (i.e. Renaud) was doing all the work. Now that he's not
going to contribute to the GPL Nessus anymore, they are forced to get up and
do some work.
Or are you saying people are impossible of volunteering without constant
harassment?
Then again they might not have, the point is there was no attempt from
Tenable to ask for what they wanted.
I strongly disagree with that statement. Nessus started as an open source
project, BEFORE Tenable existed. There's been many years now for folks to
contribute. While there's not been an "adoption" campaign like with Firefox,
Linux, etc, Tenable has made it clear that contributions are welcome.
Merely being GPL is not a enough to create a successful OSS project,
you have to invite the help. Some OSS projects don't like outside help
and actively reject anything that comes their way through arrogance, I
don't believe Nessus has, but unless there is an open invitation and a
plea when code is scarce people won't know there is a shortfall. I'm on
the User/Devel/Plugin/Announce mailing lists and didn't notice any
pleas for help.
It's about the Tenable business model, not lack of contributions.
Tenable is a company that makes money off of appliances that uses Nessus. So
they hire programmers to work on Nessus. They've decided to write a bunch of
proprietary code and create a new version of Nessus and not GPL it. In other
words, the code has ALREADY FORKED.
It's not a big deal, because no one can rightfully say that Renaud or others
at Tenable are obligated to continue to contribute to Nessus. What would
have happened if Renaud just quit writing code and decided to become a tree
surgeon, and Tenable went out of business? Nessus would be in about the same
state it's going to be in now...
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