Fw: Nessus closes source => How to help open source projects

[JARiley at dstsystems.com]

Fyodor <fyodor at insecure.org> 
Sent by: nmap-hackers-bounces at insecure.org
10/05/2005 04:43 PM

To
nmap-hackers at insecure.org
cc

Subject
Nessus closes source => How to help open source projects






Nmap Hackers,

In the last Insecure.Org Security Tools survey, you guys proudly voted
Nessus #1.  It complements the functionality of Nmap by going further
to detect application-level vulnerabilities.  Then in February of this
year, Tenable changed the Nessus license to further restrict the
plugins and require that you fax them a permission request form before
you use Nessus for any consulting engagements.  Renaud wrote to this
list on Feb 8
(http://seclists.org/lists/nmap-hackers/2005/Jan-Mar/0001.html),
explaining that their new slogan ("the open-source vulnerability
scanner") was accurate because the engine was still open source.
Today, their slogan has changed to "the network vulnerability
scanner", and you can probably guess what that means.  In the
announcement below, Renaud announces that Nessus 3 (due in a couple
weeks) will be binary only and forbid redistribution.  They say it
will be free, for now, if you use the delayed plugin feed.  They have
also announced that Nessus 3 will be faster and contain various other
improvements.  They promise to maintain GPL Nessus 2 for a while, but
I wouldn't count on that lasting long.

I am not taking a position on this move, but I do feel it is worth
noting for the many Nessus users on this list.  Tenable argues that
this move is necessary to further improve Nessus and/or make more
money.  Perhaps so, but the Nmap Project has no plans to follow suit.
Nmap has been GPL since its creation more than 8 years ago and I am
happy with that license.

When asked why they are making this change, Renaud replied to the
Nessus list today that open source hasn't really worked for Nessus
because "virtually nobody has ever contributed anything to improve the
scanning _engine_ over the last 6 years."  This may be the most
important and useful point we can take from this change.  Open source
really is a two-way street.  The only way we (open source projects)
can seriously compete with projects staffed by dozens or hundreds of
paid full time developers is by having hundreds or thousands of
volunteers each contributing a little bit part time.  So if you are a
heavy user of open source software, please think about how you can
help out.  Here are some ideas:

o If you are feeling ambitious, write and distribute your own little
  program to solve a problem you are having or otherwise makes your
  life easier.  It doesn't have to be anything big or fancy at first.
  Nmap started out as a little 2,000-line utility published in Phrack
  magazine.  Post your creation to Freshmeat, or to nmap-dev if it
  relates to Nmap in some way.  Hmm, I think there is a current vacuum
  in the open source vulnerability scanner field :).

o Or take a more active coding role for an existing open source
  project.  In the Nmap world, former Google SoC students are
  developing three promising projects: NmapGUI and UMIT are new GUIs
  and results viewers for large Nmap scans, and Ncat is a powerful
  reinterpretation of the venerable Netcat.  Working code for all
  three of these is available if you join the Nmap-dev list
  (http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev) and I'm sure the
  respective authors (Ole Morten Grodaas, Adriano Monteiro, and Chris
  Gibson) would appreciate help, feedback, and testing.

o Find a bug in some open source software?  Try to reproduce it with
  the latest version of the software and do some web searching to see
  if it is already known/fixed.  If not, report it with full details
  about how to reproduce it and the platform and software version of
  the software you are running.  It is even better if you can submit a
  patch which fixes the problem.

o Join the relevant mailing lists for the project and help out new
  users.  Maybe you can write or translate some documentation, such as a
  tutorial for using the product or a HOWTO for using it to solve a
  common need.

o The Nmap Project does not accept financial donations, but many other
  projects do.  If some little project does exactly what you need and
  saves you half a day of work or makes it into your regular-usage
  arsenal of tools, consider kicking the author back $5 or $10.  Not
  only will it help defray costs of the project, but it shows the author
  that users really appreciate his/her work and thus makes a newer
  version more likely.  Similarly, if you see an ad on the project
  web site that interests you, click on it and spend a couple minutes
  checking the product out.

o Spread the word!  Commercial software houses pay to spread the word
  about their product in magazines, web sites, TV, conferences, etc.
  Open source projects such as Nmap can't.  So if you find a project
  useful, don't hesitate to post a link on your web page and  mention it
  (including the URL) on mailing list, newsgroup, and web forum posts.

Those are a few ideas, and I'm sure you can think of more based on
your experience, expertise, and available resources.  Rather than mope
over the loss of open source Nessus, we can treat this as a call to
action and a reminder not to take valuable open source software such
as Ethereal, DSniff, Ettercap, gcc, emacs, apache, OpenBSD, and Linux
for granted.

Cheers,
Fyodor

PS:  Here is the Nessus announcement:

----- Forwarded message from Renaud Deraison 
<rderaison at tenablesecurity.com> -----

Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 12:16:45 -0400
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.734)
From: Renaud Deraison <rderaison at tenablesecurity.com>
To: nessus at list.nessus.org, nessus-announce at list.nessus.org
Cc: 
Subject: [Nessus-announce] Nessus Roadmap / Nessus 3.0.0rc1 testers wanted



Hi everyone,


We are a few weeks away from releasing Nessus 3.0.0, and I'd like to 
take some time to explain our roadmap in this regard.

Nessus 3 / Nessus 2 Roadmap
----------------------------


Nessus 3 is major enhancement of the key components of the Nessus 
engine - the NASL3 intepreter has been rewritten from scratch, the 
process management has changed to reduce the overhead of executing a 
plugin (instead of creating NxM processes, nessusd now only creates N 
processes), the way plugins are stored has been improved to reduce 
disk usage, etc...

Nessus 3 also contains a lot of built-in features and checks to debug 
crashes and mis-behaving plugins more easily, and to catch 
inconsistencies early.


As a result, Nessus 3 is much faster than Nessus 2 and less resource 
intensive. Your mileage may vary, but when scanning a local network, 
Nessus 3 is on average twice as fast as Nessus 2, with spikes going 
as high as 5 times faster when scanning desktop windows systems.


Nessus 3 will be available free of charge, including on the Windows 
platform, but will not be released under the GPL.

Nessus 3 will be available for many platforms, but do understand that 
we won't be able to support every distribution / operating system 
available. I also understand that some free software advocates won't 
want to use a binary-only Nessus 3. This is why Nessus 2 will 
continue to be maintained and will stay under the GPL.

To make things simple :

 - Nessus 2 : GPL, will have regular releases containing bug fixes
 - Nessus 3 : free of charge, contains major improvements


The two versions can share most of their plugins -- we intend to 
maintain backward compatibility whenever possible for most 
vulnerability checks. Some checks will only work on Nessus 3 (ie: we 
are about to release a set of plugins to determine policy 
compliance), but the huge majority will work on either platform 
likewise.


Finally, the Nessus GUI has been split in a separate project 
(NessusClient) which is released under the GPL. The 'nessus' client 
in Nessus3 is CLI only, as it will be in Nessus 2.4.x. For a GUI, use 
NessusClient.


Testers needed
---------------

That being said, we are looking for experienced Nessus users who 
would want to try Nessus 3.0.0rc1. For the sake of simplicity, we 
would like users running on Red Hat ES3 or ES4 platforms or 
compatible. We are looking for people scanning big networks, mostly 
to collect performance information. Keep in mind that Nessus3 is CLI 
only, so you'll have to use NessusWX or be familiar with the CLI.


If you are interested in testing Nessus 3.0.0rc1, please drop me a 
line at <deraison at nessus.org> (no @gmail/@hotmail/@anonymous accounts 
please).


Thanks,

                                    -- Renaud







_______________________________________________
Nessus-announce mailing list
Nessus-announce at list.nessus.org
http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus-announce

----- End forwarded message -----


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