"Here's the danger we are running into," said Alan Shimel, Chief Strategy Officer for StillSecure. "People contribute resources to these communities, whether it be time, money, or code. When they see everything they give converted for the commercial success of an individual rather than as a community as a whole, how long do you think they are going to want to keep giving?" . Nessus, maker of one of the most popular open-source vulnerability scanner programs available, changed its licensing agreement with the release of version 3.0.0 on December 12, causing a bit of a stir among security industry players that rely on the code as a component of their commercial solutions. The latest version is not available under the GPL, but instead will be sold as a commercial product. The recent licensing changes affect a broad spectrum of users, including corporations, the open-source community, and even businesses using services that use Nessus. So what exactly does this mean for open source? Is it the end of the age of innocence? What options do interested parties have going forward? The link for this article located at Linux Insider is no longer available. . The change in Nexus's licensing has sparked worries regarding the trajectory of community-driven development and the faith users have in the ecosystem.. Open Source Vulnerability Scanners, Nessus Licensing, Community Contributions, Security Software. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
Programmers on Wednesday released the new version 3.0 of SpamAssassin, open-source software for filtering out unwanted e-mail, but the changes are as much legal as technological. . . .. Project leaders for the widely used software chose to enter the fold of the Apache Software Foundation to take advantage of the nonprofit group's legal and technical resources. To make the move, SpamAssassin had to adopt the Apache License. Previously, the software was available under a choice of two licenses: the General Public License (GPL) that governs Linux and many other open-source programs and the Perl Artistic License. Open-source software advocates tout the fact that their programming philosophy permits large numbers of people to contribute to a project. But making the license change illustrated a difficulty of that broad collaboration: Project leaders had to secure the permission from all programmers who had contributed to SpamAssassin. The link for this article located at Stephen Shankland CNET News.com is no longer available. . The development team behind the popular application decided to integrate with the Linux Foundation to gain additional support.. SpamAssassin, Open-Source License, Apache Foundation, Email Filtering. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
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