Hi Dinesh,
After giving it some thoughts:
Hi Ronnie,
What drawbacks do you see in changing the plugin license ? I haven't >been
able
to make out what your worries are. Can you repeat them to me one more >time
?
I think changing licences in general is something one need to be careful
with to not do any changes one will later regret.
One major concern would be : What if someone distributes a binary
only protocol decoder plugin for ethereal and sometime later some
users decide they dont like something in the binary only plugin.
Maybe those persons thinks some features are missing or something so
they decide to write their own replacement for the plugin as GPL, thus
obsoleting the plugin. What would happen then?
Maybe that party providing the binary only plugin would think, great
now there is a third-party replacement, now we dont have to maintain our
own one any more, or would they become upset?
Would that binary only plugin be free to use for any purpose or would it
have clauses like "May not be used to decode the protocol if the intent is
to find out what the protocol looks like" ?
I will not have any problems myself with changes that allows
non-GPL or non-OpenSource binary only protocol dissectors to be
distributed in binary only form by someone.
As long as the plugin is only for dissecting a particular protocol I would
not have any problem at all.
As far as myself is concerned, I would NOT have a problem with a licence
change that allows binary-only plugins for protocol dissectors
as long as it does not threaten the rest of ethereal.
Go ahead, I wont oppose binary-only protocol dissector plugins.
As to the real benefits for changing it, I see :
- Ethereal gets a bunch of decoders for proprietary protocols which
>trumps
over other commercially available analyzers.
Would it be a problem if someone used that binary-only plugin
together with text2pcap and a shellscript and created their own
replacement dissector for that protocol?
If someone would say "Yes, that would be a problem and would not be
allowed". Would that be desireable?
- Decoders such as H.323 developed by Andrea can be used with >Ethereal.
It can already be used with ethereal, no one has yet claimed that it must
be destroyed. It is just unclear if it can be distributet together with
the ethereal source or not.
It would be good if that plugin was distributed with ethereal, but
whether the source code can be distributed together with ethereal or not
is a different issue I think.
Thanks,
ronnie sahlberg
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