License of Nmap LUA scripts

[Dirk Loss <lists () dirk-loss de>]

Hi,

I really like the idea of an Nmap scripting engine and hope that
hundreds of great Nmap LUA scripts will appear shortly. But with lots of
small separate LUA files potentially written by lots of different
authors, I fear we could face a very similar situation as Nessus users
did with Nessus plugins in late 2004:

Many users at that time thought all Nessus plugins were GNU GPL
licensed -- as the Nessus engine itself -- and were upset when Renaud
clarified this and the license of the plugins Tenable had written was
changed (see [1] for the announcement).

So I suggest that we address this issue openly beforehand. Here are some
questions I can think of:

1) Are there any restrictions concerning the license of a script to be
legally run from within Nmap?
2) What licenses does Fyodor allow for a script in order to be included
in the default Nmap distribution? (GNU GPL, clarified/modified GNU GPL
as in Nmap's COPYING file and [2], BSD license, others?)
3) How should script authors insert a license statement into their work?
(Script files tend to be short and the GNU GPL is quite long...)
4) Is there any "implicit" license automatically applied to (LUA-)code
sent as patches to nmap-dev? (Are script authors supposed to have given
consent to license their work under Nmap's license when sending a patch?)

Regards
Dirk

[1] http://mail.nessus.org/pipermail/nessus/2004-December/msg00074.html
[2] http://insecure.org/nmap/man/man-legal.html


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