mister_x_aircrack-ng

Probably yes: https://xkcd.com/538/

In my case, the OS doesn't matter at all. But the technology makes it harder, especially 802.11n and 802.11ac due to multiple streams. Email me and I can give you more details why.

I know a researcher one of those companies. I had a big contribution from a big security vendors, Core Security: Cisco migration mode attack which is in 1.2beta1. They talked about it a few years ago at BlackHat.

That's funny you mention AV vendors. I had a big issue with my hosting provider because some AV vendors flagged Aircrack-ng (the windows version) as a virus. I've got more details on my blog I think. They offered me to either stop distributing that version or shutting off my hosting or contacting all the AV vendors (about 30 of them were false positive) to have Aircrack-ng removed from the signatures. I think I've got more details in the blog.

As long as you are careful what you open and which websites you go to, pretty much the big names should be fine for you.

You can always use a VM to go to shady website or a dedicated VM for banking. I'm getting off topic but you should avoid mobile banking on your smartphone or tablet.

Aircrack-ng is mostly GPL. It has some BSD stuff in it too. I didn't have any choice of the license since I forked aircrack that was GPL. If I had the choice of the license, I would have chosen GPL (v2) anyway. The reason behind it is that people can read the code and help improve it. If it was closed source, some of the speed optimization we have and A LOT of contributions wouldn't have been possible.

I recently had (a few month to a year ago) some licensing issue with Debian because some of the code didn't have a license at all and that became a big issue since they are quite a few people who contributed to the code and some people were not reachable at all such as KoreK (I tried to contact the admin of Netstumbler a while ago but never got an answer). Thankfully, that is solved now.

I don't commercialize the code and probably never will. However, I might add commercial support by another company (but I will have some strict rules, I want quality support); I don't have enough time to do both during my free time and I wanna keep developing Aircrack-ng. It will not change anything about the current support (forum, irc, wiki and other stuff), it will just be another option for companies to get support where somebody is dedicated to their issues or questions.

I have a lot more to say about the reasons why GPL and I'll talk about it in details at BSides LV with Tod.

I agree with Tod on both points. However, ethical is not the hardest aspect of open source.

Here are a few hard things:

• Keeping working on it (events in your life are unpredictable) and sometimes even starting the project. Aircrack-ng is more than 7 years old. In my case, I was still a student and depending on my parents who discouraged me from doing it. They thought I was gonna get in trouble because of it. I didn't listen ;)

• Finding team members can become pretty hard and keeping them too. Events in their life sometimes force them to stop contributing.

• Maintaining servers with constant updates. It's consuming a LOT of my time unfortunately. And finding someone you can trust to take care of it is even harder.

• Raising money to pay for hosting/domains and hardware. Right now everything comes from my pocket. However, a friend of mine gave me a server for hosting. On the other end, the nice thing about it is that I'm independent from any company and I can decide what directions the project goes.