Martin Warnes schrieb:
Unfortunately this appears to be the case, which is possibly a shame as
I wouldn't call the GPL a shame ;-)
we have a bunch of plug-in dissectors we would willingly release for
free download, but it would be a cold day in hell before our lawyers
agreed to release the source code, even though I doubt there's anything
of proprietry value in there.
Well, there must be a reason that Wireshark contains a lot of dissector
code from company's that rarely do this otherwise.
IMHO: If Wireshark would have been released under a BSD style license
(which would allow what you think of), we would probably have a lot less
dissector variety - as you're probably not the only one thinking this way.
You might argue to your lawyers (or your boss), that releasing the code
might be beneficial because of a lot less maintenance and might even be
a good marketing thing:
- available to your customers
- being nice to the open source world
- ...
You might even be promissed, that there already were some ideas of your
executives in the open source direction, and Wireshark code could act as
a test how it's working.
However, I know from my own experience, that arguing this way can be
challenging ...
Regards, ULFL
