Rainer Duffner wrote:
Am 31.03.2006 um 22:06 schrieb Chuck Linsley:
What is the reason for SuSE's choice of Postfix over qmail? Licensing. Or the fact that DJB didn't provided any kind of license with Qmail. Also, redistribution in binary-format is not allowed. Indeed. The licensing of Qmail is very interesting, and frustrating for distributions like SUSE.
The Qmail license says all sorts of interesting things. You can re-distribute the source code. You can modify the source code. You can compile and run the source code and host it yourself. *But* as Rainer points out, you are not permitted to distribute the binaries. More specifically, the only binary you are permitted to distribute is the one that DJB produced, bit for bit verbatim. no re-compiling of any kind. DJB justifies this by saying that he does not want to do support on hacked versions of his code, because he considers 3rd party modifications to be the most likely source of vulnerabilities, and he doesn't want to clean other peoples' messes. An arrogant position for most people, but for DJB he is likely correct. As a consequence, Qmail is formally *not* open source, even though the source code is available, because the source code is not *freely* (libre) available because of this restriction. Therefore it is basically not possible for SUSE to distribute Qmail. At most we could bundle the source code and give you instructions on how to compile it. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com