J C Lawrence <claw@kanga.nu> writes:
> I agree with the assertion, but differ in my preferences. I like
> explicit licensing, not because they state my legal obligations (an
> argument I don't fully accept) but because they establish the author's
> preferences -- what he would like done -- and thus build the beginnings
> of a social contract between me and him.
<http://cr.yp.to/rights.html>
<http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html>
I think those establish djb's preferences reasonably clearly.
> Quite, and this is where my major problem comes in. I like the audit
> trail and reproducability gains from packaging systems. And yes, while
> I could build my own packages for QMail, that argument largely falls
> flat were it to be extended to every software I run.
You can distribute qmail packages.
<http://cr.yp.to/qmail/dist.html>
You can't distribute file-system-compliant packages for the reasons stated
on that page (I disgree with djb on this point, but he wrote the software,
so he gets to hold weird opinions about it).
> This encludes say the BSD ports system as there are many systems
> which should not have compilers installed on them (eg shell account
> servers, firewalls, and other security sensitive boxen).
I believe that qmail is already part of the OpenBSD ports collection. I
could be wrong, though, not running OpenBSD myself.
I'd prefer that qmail be free software too, but the licensing status isn't
that noticeably different than the original Qt license, which was annoying
but generally not considered fatal outside of people with a strong
ideological belief in truly free software. (Please don't anyone read any
implied criticism into that last statement; I'm often such a person
myself.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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