STILL no word from Sourcefire about their License Changes
Victor Julien (co-author of the inline portions of Snort) posted in his blog a while ago about the license changes to Snort that Sourcefire is trying to slip by. They have made a mass change to the Snort code, even that parts they do NOT hold the copyright about.
Victor and myself have asked and blogged about the issue and after weeks have no response from Sourcefire. Victor doesn’t want the license on his code changed, and hasn’t been able to get a response from Sourcefire.
I personally don’t have code in there, but I am concerned at the motivation of this change, as well as the lack of respect for the contributors rights. Victor has put up a new post which puts things very well:
http://www.inliniac.net/blog/2007/07/16/snort-license-changes-revisited.html
I echo that sentiment, and add my concerns here:
What is the issue in GPLv3 that Sourcefire is concerned about?
What are Sourcefire’s intentions for the future of Snort then?
Why is CVS no longer accessible?
Is it possible to get any response from Sourcefire about this? A lot of us rely on this code, and it’s not all owned by sourcefire. If we can’t trust Sourcefire to even communicate with us, then I think we need to start thinking about a new home for Snort.
If you want the community’s trust, you have to communicate!
Matt
July 17th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Has anyone reported this to the GPL violators list? Personally I’d stick my code under the GPLv2 only, and many people are choosing to do so and I have no issue with Sourcefire doing this. But they are violating the GPL by forcing Victor’s and others code to be under the GPLv2 and only the GPLv2. Given them taking a harder stance on people using their code, you’d think they give the same respect to Snort contributors.
I didn’t realize CVS access was gone. Also, has Sourcefire integrated any patches from the community recently without first rewriting it? The main reason to rewrite would be to obtain the copyright themselves. Could we be seeing Sourcefire rewrites of all parts not under their copyright? If we start to see this I fear that we’ll need to prep for a closed source Snort. Perhaps its time to think harder about a fork, something I’ve suggested before.
Of course, this is posted with an alias.
July 18th, 2007 at 3:35 am
Follow up to:
http://www.bleedingthreats.net/index.php/2007/06/30/sourcefire-changing-the-license-on-snort/