On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Tim Potter wrote:
> A question no-one has asked yet is why was ethereal licensed with the
> GPL in the first place? I would like to think that choosing a license
> for a piece of software is a decision that a lot of thought has been put
> in to. To me it is a philosophical decision.
I licensed it under the GPL for two main reasons:
- I like the license.
- I had been using GPLed software for years, and it seemed like a good
way to give back to the community.
The original goal of the project was to create a commercial-quality
analyzer for Unix. It has (for me at least) expanded to the best
multi-platform analyzer. This includes supporting as many protocols as
possible.
The Ethereal Windows installer is downloaded over 20,000 times a month
from the main site, and over 50,000 times a month from SourceForge. This
doesn't include downloads from other sites, binaries for other platforms,
binaries included with other packages (Red Hat, SuSE, Solaris, Debian,
etc.), or source code. If it's not the world's most popular analyzer
right now, it's certainly in the top three. The fact that it's available
at no cost is only part of the reason it's so popular. I regularly hear
from people who have other analyzers at their disposal, but prefer
Ethereal.
We can't ignore the fact that we have a large and growing user base, and
they depend on Ethereal as a solid, quality product. It's apparent to me
that if we keep the product purely GPL, we won't be able to support quite
a few protocols. This conflicts with the original and present goals, and
does a disservice to the user base.
> To simplify things a bit (OK a lot), I might take the stance that if you
> aren't going to share with me then I'm not going to share with you in which
> case I would make my software GPL. If I didn't care what people did
> with my software as long as they respected the original copyright then I
> might go BSD.
>
> Do binary only dissectors go against the vision the original authors of
> Ethereal had? Perhaps Gerald can answer this.
I am completely opposed to binary-only plugins, and won't agree to any
license change that would allow them. (I'm not sure what good they would
do anyway; it probably wouldn't be difficult to reverse-engineer one using
randpkt and <your favorite scripting language>.)
