Re: Nipper licensing

[Fizz <fizz () titania co uk>]

It has cost me a *LOT* of money to develop Nipper. Network devices are very 
expensive as I am sure everyone knows. It also took me a *LOT* of time to 
develop Nipper. It is also true that a lot of companies use Nipper to to make 
money, such as auditing companies and internal IT departments.

During that time only 1 person has ever seen the need to donate to the 
project, even though it makes money for a *LOT* of businesses.

Nipper has had commercial licensing exclusions for a little while now. Version 
1 is now released as a full commercial version. This means that companies who 
benefit from using Nipper will now have to pay a licence fee. This fee will 
enable the purchase of more expensive network devices and further improve 
Nipper.

NOTE: Home users will be able to continue to use Nipper for free.

Nipper is a complex program that supports almost 30 devices in its present 
release. Nipper 1 has almost twice the number of code lines from the previous 
version and over triple that of the one before. It is not a simple grep of a 
configuration file and it audits a huge number of different settings and 
protocols.

Ian Ventura-Whiting


On Wednesday 02 September 2009 10:48:42 Eric Sesterhenn wrote:
> * BMF (badmotherfsckr () gmail com) wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 1:16 AM, Alan Buxey <A.L.M.Buxey () lboro ac uk> 
wrote:
> > > ouch. a couple of years ago we had some home-brew code doing the job.
> > > Nipper
> > > came along...was free..and did everything we did + a little more.
> > >
> > > but now it looks like we'll be picking up our old Perl code and fixing
> > > it up
> > > to do everything that Nipper does - and a little more.
> >
> > Was Nipper not available as source and licensed so it could be forked in
> > an event such as this? If not, consider it an object lesson in free as in
> > beer vs free as in speech.
>
> LICENSE file for nipper-cli 0.12.0 and libnipper 0.12.6 states:
>
> THIS IS IMPORTANT:
>
> libNipper and all other Nipper products are licensed under the GPL version
> 3 with the following exceptions.
>
> 1. The code cannot be used as part of a commercial product. A commercial
>    license can be arranged for the integration of Nipper with a commercial
>    product. Contact fizz () titania co uk for commercial licensing
> information.
>
> 2. Any code that integrates Nipper MUST display the following copyright
>    information with the programs own copyright information:
>
>    Nipper Copyright (C) 2006 - 2008 by Ian Ventura-Whiting
>
>    In order to maintain the latest copyright information for each libNipper
>    release, this information can be extracted using the API.
>
>
> Nipper is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
> WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS
> FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License v3 (below) for
> more details.
>
> Regards, Eric
>
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