Re: [Ethereal-users] How much is Ethereal to purchase?

[Richard Urwin <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 09 Jun 2004 12:50 am, Lynne_Nielsen@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Hello!
>
> We are interested in purchasing the actual software and that review &
> decipher the traces after we capture them.  We understand that this
> portion of Ethereal is NOT free. 

All of Ethereal is available under the GPL. This is highly unlikely to 
change.

Under the GPL you are allowed to:
read the source code,
modify the source code,
incorporate the source code into your own code or vice-versa,
use the modified or incorporated code only within your company,
distribute the modified or incorporated code under the GPL.

You are not allowed to:
distribute the modified or incorporated code under any other terms 
including closed-source terms.

If you use any Ethereal code in your product, then your entire product 
must be licenced under the GPL, and therefore you must provide the 
complete source-code to anyone to whom you have provided the 
executable, and they are licenced to redistribute without reference to 
you.

If I understand your question correctly, you are welcome to read all 
parts of Ethereal to gain an understanding of particular network 
protocols. However you can not take that code and put it in your own 
product that you then intend to sell, (because you will not want to 
sell it under the GPL, although you could do so.)

For authoritative commentry on the GPL, see 
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

-- 
Richard Urwin