Tenable Network Security, the company behind the Nessus open-source project, has updated its business model [PDF] to offer a for-fee subscription to its vulnerability plugin updates for commercial users.
This sounds a bit like Trolltech’s early efforts to get commercial users to pay while leaving non-commercial users free to use the software without paying, but it’s not. Trolltech’s maligned model wasn’t open source, as it discriminates against a class of user (the commercial user).
In Tenable’s case, the code is free, but the information that flows through it (Up-to-date vulnerability information, for example) is not:
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