Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] ethereal licensing

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 16:04:34 -0800
On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 02:04:31PM -0800, Shreesha Kunjibettu wrote:
> 1. We are using Solaris 8 in our unified messaging product. Can we add
> ethereal package to our product?

Possibly.

> Are there any licensing or legal issues involved in this?

Yes.  Ethereal is licensed under the GPL:

	http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL

which imposes some restrictions on the licensee.

For example, if you provide Ethereal as a separate program, you have to
let anybody who buys your product give away whatever Ethereal source and
binary you provide to anybody they want to with no restrictions other
than those imposed by the GPL, and if you link it into one of your own
programs, you have to let anybody who buys your product give away that
program to anybody they want to with no restrictions other than those
imposed by the GPL.  I.e., if you link any Ethereal code into your
program, you *CANNOT* prevent people from giving that program away in
your license for that program!

In addition, you have to make available source to Ethereal to anybody
who gets Ethereal with your product and, if you make any modifications
to Etheral, you have to make available those modifications to anybody
who gets Ethereal with your product.

Read the GPL carefully.

> 2. While testing ethereal, we were able to get all the SIP traces. But for
> some reason, ethereal did not capture RTP information. Is there any
> configuration required to enable RTP capture?

Ethereal will only recognize RTP traffic if either

	1) there's earlier traffic in the capture that another dissector
	   recognizes as setting up an RTP session - in the current CVS
	   version, the H.245, RTSP, and SDP dissectors do that, but, in
	   releases prior to 0.10.0, the SDP dissector *didn't* do that,
	   so if your SIP trace contained SDP traffic to set up an RTP
	   session, you'd only have the RTP traffic recognized as such
	   if you read it with 0.10.0 or later;

	2) you explicitly tell it that traffic to or from a given port
	   is RTP traffic, with the "Decode As..." menu item.