"Ron Gula, CTO and CEO of Tenable, was interviewed by Federico Biancuzzi over at SecurityFocus. Federico asked Ron why Tenable decided not to release Nessus3 under the GPL license, and here is what he had to say:
"'Ron Gula: Customer demand. Organizations want a free product that they can use, and a place they can get commercial support and training from if needed. I'd also like to point out that although Nessus 3 is not released under the GPL, Tenable is still actively maintaining Nessus 2. We just released an update for Nessus 2.2 with lots of improvements...'"