Snort mailing list archives

RE: license Question


From: PPowenski () oag com
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 13:20:58 +0100

Has the open source agreement been written by lawyers?
If not could there be problems with it. Are we at the mercy of
interpertation.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Nathan [mailto:jeff () snort org] 
Sent: 02 July 2003 09:40
To: Matt Kettler; Michael Steele; 'Snort'
Subject: RE: [Snort-users] license Question


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I mean no offense toward anyone, but let's leave the legal wrangling and 
armchair quarterbacking on the subject of open source licenses to the 
attorneys.

The complexities of the topic are best addressed outside the scope of this 
list.

- -Jeff

- --On Tuesday, July 1, 2003 16:22 -0400 Matt Kettler <mkettler () evi-inc com>

wrote:

At 05:12 PM 6/30/2003 -0700, Michael Steele wrote:
He wants to provide support, so there is nothing he needs to do other 
then what is required by his local authority on setting up a 
business. He might want to consider liability insurance, or word it 
in his support contract that he cannot be held liable for anything 
out of the support he is providing. This needs to be done by an 
attorney, and should be part of any support contract.

Well, he wants to provide INSTALLATION and support. Installation 
constitutes distribution, distributing copies of snort is subject to 
the GPL terms, which really aren't all that unreasonable.

Heck, technically he could just leave a copy of the source tarball on 
the machines he installed it on and he's fully compliant. I just 
stated the "CD and printed license" as a "best practice" 
recomendation.


As far as I know you can take Snort and do with it as you want. I see 
other variants of Snort out there and commercial companies use it all 
the time in their commercial devices; anything from switches, to full 
blown IDS devices.

That part is not true. There are certain limitations on what you can 
do with snort. There's not many, but there are some. For example I 
cannot use code directly from snort in a non-open source product.

You really should read the license.  BSD licenses are generally "do 
whatever, but it's still my copyright", but GPL licenses are "do 
whatever, but it must always remain open source when you're done with 
it".

Snort is GPL licensed, not BSD.


Isn't that the beauty of 'Open Source'?

True, although some OS software is protected against "embrace, extend 
and extinguish" tactics by GPL licenses.

The relative merits of BSD vs GPL vs other OS type licenses is the 
subject of a great many flame wars, really the only relevant bits here 
are how GPL differs from "do whatever".







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- - Albert Einstein
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