On Aug 31, 2004, at 3:45 PM, Jerry Talkington wrote:
On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 05:20:47PM +0000, daveshawley@xxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
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.
If you are only distributing it within your organization, then you can
make
whatever changes you want without releasing anything. When you
redistribute outside of your organization (e.g. to customers or
contractors,) then you must make the original source code and any
changes available (including the source to your plugin, since it seems
that the required file plugins/plugin_api.h is required, which is
GPL'd.)
That is our current plan. The source code for all of our dissectors will
be made available. Even though it is going to be distributed as an
internal tool, there is always the chance of an ex-employee or customer
getting their hands on it (see below).
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.)
You can't just "make the source available." You have to make the
source
available *under the GPL*.
That was the intention. The source will be made available either upon
request or via an FTP server *and* it will be placed under the auspices
of the GPL.
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.
If you distribute an executable version, then you need to make the
source for that version available. AFAICT, since it's still available
on ethereal.com, it's available to whomever you distribute (the
unmodified version) to. If you add code, then distribute an executable
to someone outside your organization, then you must make that code GPL.
Understood. When I originally examined this issue our management
decided that
we weren't going to disclose any of our code hence we never distributed
Ethereal or our plug-ins. However, after reexamining the issue again, I
think
that we are going to distribute Ethereal with GPL'd dissectors for a
select
set of protocols. I don't know if we will publish the dissectors back
into
the code branch or not - still have to make that decision.
Any thoughts are appreciated. Having a network analyzer available on
our
servers would make my job much, much easier.
You can always distribute the unmodified version to customers and SEs
to
capture the data, then use a version that actually decodes those
protocols internally for analysis. You could also give a modified
version to your SEs, but then it's only a matter of time before an SE
trying to make his quarterly quota give it to a customer to try to
garner favor ;) At that point you are just asking to get sued by the
EFF.
This is similar to what we are currently doing. Whenever an issue comes
up that really warrants the use of a packet sniffer, we have an FE
install Ethereal from the default distribution, capture packets, and
send the binary capture file back to an engineer. Then we (the
engineers)
dissect away with our own little custom dissectors. It is a bit of a
pain for the engineers, but we haven't really had a choice previously.
--
GPG public key:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x9D5B8762
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Thanks for your prompt response. With any luck will will publish our
protocol dissectors back into the Ethereal tree to extend the protocol
coverage a little more :-)
Dave.
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