Nessus now forked :: GNessUs

[|gridley|]

From the mailing list 'full-disclosure'.

GNessUs is a GPL fork of the Nessus security scanner. As a result of
recent announcements by Tenable, we believe a fork of Nessus is required
to allow future free development of this tool.

Whilst we would like to believe that we will be able to continue to take
updates of the Nessus 2 source code from the Nessus web site we will be
endeavoring to add fresh functionality and plugins as part of the GNessUs
project. The fork will be based on the current nessus 2.2.5 packages from
GNU/Debian, the source of which can be found above in a slightly modified
form. We would welcome contact from any interested developers.

This intention to fork has come after numerous pub and work discussions
between myself and colleagues of mine from within the UK security
industry.

Cheers,
Tim
- --
Tim Brown, GNessUs
<mailto:[email protected]>
<http://www.gnessus.org/>

[hypronix]

As previously discussed on IRC this comes as a natural reaction once something is announced to become closed-source. Let's hope the development of GNessUs will be steady and the tool itself will be on par with the original from which it forked itself.

[|gridley|]

Originally posted here by hypronix
As previously discussed on IRC this comes as a natural reaction once something is announced to become closed-source. Let's hope the development of GNessUs will be steady and the tool itself will be on par with the original from which it forked itself.

I think I missed (atleast parts of) that irc discussion, but I agree with you.

Anyway, for the people that are interested in additionals but are not fd subscribers:
initial post: http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/f...er/037863.html
index sorted by thread:
http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/f...ead.html#37863

Nessus has been open source for a long time. Despite that, the majority of
contributions have come from a very small amount of people. Even with
plugins, some 95% (i think) were written by the Nessus team, not outside
contributors.

Fyodor's post might be of interest also .
"Nessus closes source => How to help open source projects"
http://seclists.org/lists/nmap-hacke...-Dec/0000.html

[zencoder]

You mean people still talk about AO stuff on IRC?!? Everytime I've been in there it's been dead, or typical crap.

As for Gnessus...good for them, hope it works out. I am thinking it'll suffer a similar fate to PGP/GnuPG (although that aint a fork like this...still...). An awesome public key crypto program with craptacular interfaces for non-Linux X systems. *shrug* That's no way to steal thunder from Windows app's..., and the Gnessus team should beware that problem trying to steal thunder from Tenable's newly closed source and industry entrenched app.

[rowdy_yates]

stupid question time.

so what does thing "really" mean? once any open source project achieves industry wide recognition as the bar of excellence, it will become closed source. is that the development/business model that will previal in the open souce community from now on?