SpiderLabs Blog

ModSecurity Update: Increasing Community Involvement

Written by | Mar 30, 2011 10:20:00 AM

New Licensing

Trustwave is commited to the development of the ModSecurity project and in supporting its wide community of users. To this end, Trustwave announced today that we are changing the ModSecurity licensing from GPLv2 to Apache Software License v2. This move was made in order to remove many of the developmental roadblocks that were present with the previous restricted licensing that prevented would-be adopters of ModSecurity from contributing to and enhancing the code.

Encouraging ModSecurity Ports

This licensing change in turn makes it much easier for commercial vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft to actively participate in porting projects of ModSecurity. Trustwave's SpiderLabs is actively working with these two vendors to port ModSecurity to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Tier and to the Microsoft IIS v7 platform.

If you would like to port ModSecurity to a new platform, please let us know.

Community Development Support

In addition to the licensing change, SpiderLabs has also made several enhancements to project management to make the development more transparent and to encourage community development.

We have created a Developer page on the modsecurity.org site to help aid community contributions by extending code in one of the following three ways:

  1. Modifying the source code directly
  2. Building custom modsecurity modules
  3. Utilizing the Lua API

Community developer support for ModSecurity is available on the mod-security-developers mailing list. You must subscribe first in order to post. The list archives are available as Developer Archives.

Development Transparency

Active development progress is now linked directly from the public Jira ticketing system into the ModSecurity Developers mail-list so that the community can see the incremental advancements. We have also migrated all project documentation to the SourceForge Wiki system including an updated project roadmap. This ensures that the most up-to-date data is available to the community and allows for community members to directly contribute back by enhancing documentation.