The source code of one of the world's most popular free security tools will no longer be available to all, with its creator stating its open source licence was fuelling competition against his company. "Nessus 3 will be available free of charge ... But will not be released under the GPL," wrote Renaud Deraison yesterday to the software's email mailing list. 
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Member since:2005-08-17
Ah, but company A can offer much better support than company B because they wrote the original piece of software.
example: Redhat vs CentOS
CentOS is redhat enterprise server compiled by some bunch of developers, which they give away for free.
Notice how Redhat still makes money.
Releasing code under a non-commercial licence makes big headaches for developers. what consitutes non-commercial? if I use in on my desktop computers in my office isn't that commercial use?
- Jesse McNelis
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
Member since:}snip{
~~This is what happens when you don't understand that the license that you release your code under allows for this and other things.~~
}remainder discarded{
It is? Do you have other examples of GPL licensed software that is still released and maintained under one version by the originator and a newer version is distributed for free as a closed source project? I wasn't aware that this was a common practice introduced by not understanding the GPL.
Member since:}snip{
~~This is what happens when you don't understand that the license that you release your code under allows for this and other things.~~
}remainder discarded{
It is? Do you have other examples of GPL licensed software that is still released and maintained under one version by the originator and a newer version is distributed for free as a closed source project? I wasn't aware that this was a common practice introduced by not understanding the GPL.
Member since:
Member since:
2005-08-26
This is what happens when you don't understand that the license that you release your code under allows for this and other things.
People releasing code under GPL seems to forget that others can take your code and make money from YOUR investment in the code, giving nothing back in return as long as they don't modify it.
What this means is that where company A for some reason releases code under the GPL, thinking that it is safe to do so, at the same time as they sell a product based on that code to get back the investment, company B can come along, take the code, compile, then sell it at cheaper than company A can because the work is already done.
A better option would be to license it under a non-commercial license if they want to open source it at all, to prevent competition from making money off their work.