neat story

[João Miguel Neves]

[This is a reply to the original post. Computer problems prevent me from
quoting.]

Hi Rui,

First your boss must understand a few things about nessus:

- in the security market secrecy usually means incompetence
(http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cryptography-faq/snake-oil/)
- nessus is not a single person or group effort, it's a community one

In the nessus case, and in most other GPL covered software projects, GPL
is not there to protect the authors, it's there as a contract that defines
the community that works in those projects. Your main argument must be
that, alone, no part of the community would be able to develop nessus to
the level it has reached (this is easy to show if you just count the
amount of authors on the plugins alone).

If he doesn't accept that, you can always say that the developers  aren't
loosing money with the software, but actually saving money by making it
Free Software:

- Quality control - more people using means more people finding and
correcting bugs.
- Development - more vulnerability detection plugins are created and are
created faster than for proprietary alternatives.
- Security - the better quality of the program means better security for
every user.
- Quality - the better quality achieved means more users that detect and
correct bugs and create vulnerability detection plugins even faster.

The result: the best of breed security auditing software there is.

If these arguments don't help, you can always ask if he usually refuses
presents just because he doesn't give anything in return. As a last resort
you can ask him to go to one of our (both me and Rui are part of ANSOL)
presentations on Free Software.

	See you,
						Joao Miguel Neves