Re: Sourcefire Acquired by Check Point Software

[Renaud Deraison <deraison () nessus org>]

On Oct 7, 2005, at 19:59, Frank Knobbe wrote:


> > - Nessus 2 source is still available, GPLed and will be maintained.
>
> Good news. Maintained as far as code updates or in regards to plugins?

Bug fixes/minor improvement in the code AND the plugins.

Fyodor hinted in his email to nmap-hackers that we would not maintain  
2.x for long, and this is totally inaccurate ("FUD" as they say).  
Since 100% of our user base is currently using Nessus <= 2.x, it  
would be plainly stupid to abandon this branch.

Actually, when working on Nessus 3, several bugs have been fixed and  
backported to Nessus 2.2.x. In addition, Nessus 2.2.5 contains a  
noticeable speed improvement over 2.2.4 when running on a slow hard  
disk, and that's something we backported because it was not an  
architectural change.

A lot of tedious work has been poured in 3.x to make it faster when  
scanning local networks (if you're scanning a remote site with 2.x,  
odds are that the bottleneck is the bandwidth) and to create an  
architecture which is in line with our roadmap, and we don't want to  
open source these changes. If you do not want to use closed-source  
software, you can still use 2.x as we do not foresee to stop  
maintaining it.



                                    -- Renaud