Hello again,
I raised this question about a year or so ago on this list. Now that I have
some time to look into it again, I was wondering what exactly are the terms
of distributing Ethereal (as-is) and also distributing plug-in dissectors for
various protocols. I am asking this question because my employer would like
to distribute Ethereal on our distribution disks so that our field engineers
have access to such a fine tool.
In my original post, I was assuming that we were not going to be able to
make the source code to our dissectors available. Now that we are revisiting
the issue, [they] have decided that it is probably permissible to make the
source code for some of our internal dissectors available upon request. The
tool will be made available on our distribution disks which are generally only
used by our internal personnel; however, the customer has a copy of the
disks so they should be considered recipients of the package as well - hence
my employer's concern about exposing [possibly] proprietary protocols.
(Please don't flame me to hard here... I'm just a software engineer and,
believe it or not, there are a large number of closed protocols and networks
out there.)
I guess what it really comes down to is: "what source code must be made
available?" My interpretation of the license is that we have to retain the
various notices as well as make our distributed dissectors available in source
form. This does not include our core products... correct? Our intent is to use
Ethereal as a diagnostic tool only - it is not being added to our product line
to provide an enhanced feature or anything like that.
Any thoughts are appreciated. Having a network analyzer available on our
servers would make my job much, much easier.
Thanks,
Dave Shawley.
--
