Previously Snort and all the rules were licensed exclusively under the GPL, what prompted the change?
Sourcefire has learned of people that were misusing the GPL by distributing the Snort rules tightly coupled with their applications and claiming that the GPL doesn’t affect them. This change has allowed Sourcefire to support the open source model by better identifying when someone is using the Snort rules in a closed source fashion without commitment to the open source philosophy. For developers building open source applications using Snort rules or Snort end users in general, the change in the licensing policy has no effect. The changes in the license apply specifically to organizations that are commercially redistributing the rules for either a product or a service offering.
