There are some confusion about the copyright ownership of a Nessus report. When you think about it, a Nessus report is like a book regarding the security of your network, and as with every book, there are limitations to what you can do with it. Basically, there are two ways to consider a Nessus report : (a) Some people think that since the text is under the GPL, the report is free of rights and basically falls under the public domain. (b) Some people think that a Nessus reports is copyrighted whoever wrote the plugins which appear in the report. Point (a) is a common misconception. I consider that the report is beyond the scope of the GPL and therefore falls under the "traditional" copyright law. Point (b) is currently implicit, but I think it really is time to underline it. So in order to clear up any doubt about this, I plan to add a README.PLUGINS_OUTPUT in nessus-plugins/ and on the Nessus website to clear up any confusion : I consider that a Nessus report is copyright whoever wrote the text which appear into it. So I am posting this here : - To request comments from plugins writers on that issue. I am not interested in endless philosophical debates about the GPL but rather in implementation issues, ie: should the name of every author be printed in the Nessus reports ? - If you, as a plugin writer, want to put the text of your plugin in the public domain, let me know and I will add a special mention in your plugin. -- Renaud _______________________________________________ Plugins-writers mailing list Plugins-writers@private http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/plugins-writers
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Dec 10 2003 - 12:00:12 PST