RE: Nmap/Nessus copyright

["C. Church" <cchurch () alertlogic net>]

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