Dailydave mailing list archives
RE: Nmap/Nessus copyright
From: "C. Church" <cchurch () alertlogic net>
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 15:53:56 -0500
Firstly, I'm new to the list, and hope to not clutter things up too much here, but I am quite confused by the statements being made here, in regard to nmap. My primary confusion comes from one statement in the nmap license you linked to, that states that "Executes Nmap and parses the results" constitutes a derivative work. However, in two key statements in the GPL FAQ, it seems that they clearly disagree with you: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput "In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from." And then, in http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation "By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs." That statement seems _extremely clear_ to me. The only way I could think that you find any ambiguity is in the following: "But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program." Although, I would be hard pressed to believe that one is "exchanging complex internal data structures" through the nmap command-line. My question is, how do you reconcile this distinction? You seem to be claiming that calling nmap with command-line switches and reading the output constitutes a derivative work, although the GPL faq seems to indicate otherwise - that the output is fully copyrighted to the owner of the input data (presumably the owner of the network, whose network information is being reported by nmap), and that using command-line switches does not constitute a derivative work. It sounds quite analogous to saying that if I call gimp on a picture via command-lines, then the resulting image _must also be GPL'd_. !c
Current thread:
- RE: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software, (continued)
- RE: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Kyle Quest (Oct 07)
- RE: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Frank Knobbe (Oct 07)
- RE: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Kyle Quest (Oct 08)
- RE: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Cedric Blancher (Oct 08)
- RE: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Frank Knobbe (Oct 08)
- Re: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Renaud Deraison (Oct 08)
- Re: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Frank Knobbe (Oct 09)
- Re: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Renaud Deraison (Oct 09)
- RE: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Dave Korn (Oct 20)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright Fyodor (Oct 20)
- RE: Nmap/Nessus copyright C. Church (Oct 20)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright Fyodor (Oct 20)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright ADT (Oct 20)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright Fyodor (Oct 20)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright ADT (Oct 21)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright Fyodor (Oct 21)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright ADT (Oct 21)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright Paul Wouters (Oct 21)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright Dave Aitel (Oct 21)
- Re: Nmap/Nessus copyright Fyodor (Oct 21)
- RE: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Kyle Quest (Oct 07)
- Re: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software Michel Arboi (Oct 21)