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Nessus cierra su codigo.
Acabo de leer en la lista de correo de Nmap que Nessus, el popular scanner de vulneabilidades open-source cierra su codigo aunque de momento se seguirán distribuyendo binarios de forma gratiuta. Lo más interesante son las reflexiones de Fyodor, el responsable de nmap acerca de la participacion de los usuarios en el desarrollo de software libre. Esta en inglés y espero que lo entendais porque no tengo intencion de traducirlo a no ser que os interese muchisimo.
From Fyodor to 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:
Si a alguien le interesa, el anuncio oficial de Nessus se puede encontrar [Aqui]
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