QMail and DJB ... was Re: [LIH] any one using djbdns?

[Sandip Bhattacharya <sandipb@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Raj!

This seems to be heading the [LIG] way ... 

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 08:23:11AM +0530, Raju Mathur merrily said:
> 1.  He refuses to make the licensing of the software public, instead
> makes statements like ``You can use it under these conditions'', ``If
> you want to commercially distribute or modify contact me'', etc.
> In essence, he controls the software and you have to live by his rules
> if you want to use it.

AFAIK, DJB doesn't prevent you from distributing qmail per se. He
disallows distributions of *modified* versions of Qmail. Patches to
the original qmail distrib are available in plenty.

I am no Open source purist. But I personally feel the situation is
this :
 1. You have an excellent piece of software which is clearly superior
    with respect to other alternatives.
 2. You have access to the source.
 3. You have the freedom to modify the source to your own liking.
 4. You have the freedom to distribute the original package as much as
     you like.
 5. You have the freedom to distribute patches to qmail for any
    different behaviour as you want. As long as you don't apply them
    to the original package and distribute them.
 6. Wherever on earth you might be, any qmail installation that you
    come across has exactly the same files in the same places, and
    the whole installation works exactly the same way.

Sounds good enough for me. What more freedom do you want ? The only
cribber seems to me are folks like Redhat, SUSE are other distributors
who like distributing packages with their own modifications. So you
keep on getting CERT bulletins on "vulnerability on Redhat rpms of
xxxx" - vulnerablities which do not exist in the original
packages. And I suppose when a "RedHatter" (like me ;) has a chance to
sit on a Debian or a SUSE box, I would first have to sit down for
quite a while to figure out where the various stuff are located ... 

Whose freedom are you talking about? Commercial distributors? I agree,
this should trouble them. But what problem do they have in providing
patches to the original distrib?

> multiple connections to the server and send one copy of the message to
> each recipient, instead of opening a single connection and sending
> multiple RCPT TO:'s with a single copy of the message.  While that may
> be the ideal way of doing things, it doesn't work in bandwidth-starved
> countries like India, where 100KB virus attachments are the rule
> rather than the exception.  However, try to convince Dan of this :)

I might be stretching things a bit, but why do you expect him to
incorporate such a basic change for specific situations? Isn't that
how various packages have become bloated in the past? Look at the size
of the Qmail distrib and what it can do, as compared to the size of
sendmail and what extra things THAT could do !!!
> 
> On the whole, I'd rather stick with a software which is under some
> decent free license like GPL or BSD, which at least gives me the
> freedom to modify or have someone else modify to my liking.

Again ... he doesn't prevent you from modifying your own installation
of Qmail!! If you like qmail to work in a way, why can't you
distribute the patch separetely? IMHO, Dan just wants people to know
that the original package is the qmail as it is commonly found
elsewhere. Whenever somebody has to put in the patch he is constantly
reminded that they ARE modifying an original package ... and from here
on they are responsible for any deviations in qmail behaviour. 

Again why does freedom got be either the GNU or BSD way?

- Regards,
 Sandip


-- 
-------------------------------------
Sandip Bhattacharya 
sandipb @ bigfoot.com
http://www.sandipb.net
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