Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 12:24:04 +0800 From: Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" <ejs@bfd.com>, Michael Hancock <michaelh@cet.co.jp>, Alex Povolotsky <tarkhil@asteroid.svib.ru>, current@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sendmail 8.9 Message-ID: <199805270424.MAA00317@spinner.netplex.com.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 26 May 1998 14:35:34 MST." <199805262135.OAA01464@dingo.cdrom.com>
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Mike Smith wrote: > > On Tue, 26 May 1998, Mike Smith wrote: > > > > > > One thing we need to look at is the license. I was working on sendmail > > > > 8.9.0 with db-2.0 on SunOS recently and I think I saw some licencing > > > > changes in both distributions. > > > > > > db-2.0 is bad licensing ju-ju in the default case. If it can't be > > > built to work with 1.8x we may be in trouble. > > > > It compiled cleanly on 2.2.6 for me, without complaining about anything, > > so I'm assuming that it was working. It does no longer work with db-1.5X > > and prior, if I remember correctly. > > db-2 works just fine on FreeBSD - that's not the problem. The problem > is the *license*. Some time back the relative merits of switching to > db-2 were discussed, but the ultimate decision was that the license was > not viable. There are problems with the sendmail license too. There are some wording problems that make it ambiguous, and one interpretation makes it far worse than some of the restrictions in the GPL. For starters: - the scope of "distribution" and "the complete source code" are not defined. One interpretation is that it covers distribution of sendmail and the source to sendmail, on the other end of the scale it could mean the *entire* system, including OS, any proprietary components etc. - there is no time limit to the 'irrevokable offer to provide source code' at cost (in the case of for-profit binary distributions). At least the GPL has an upper limit of 3 years here, and even that's a rather long time.. especially if you *loose* the source somehow or have legal restrictions (eg: the USL lawsuit settlement that prevented any more freebsd-1.x CD distributions going out from WC). These are not practical problems that anybody is going to be faced with yet, since everybody that I know of that distributes FreeBSD at present does so with source, (at least those that use sendmail, anyway). However, there are now some companies that use FreeBSD embedded within the product or hardware, so it's not something that we can take for granted. Moving it to src/contrib might be a safer way since it's going to be part of the system that would need to be carefully scrutinized or jetisoned in some situations. Before everybody jumps up and says "use xyzmail[er] instead" or "just don't ship anything in the base", I'm not sure that we can do that as parts of the base *assume* that sendmail (or a workalike) is present. Maybe it's time to bring back a basic local-only mail transport that gets blown away when a real sendmail or comparable (qmail, smail, vmailer, exim, etc etc) gets installed from a port. Sigh. Anyway, things would be helped a lot if the Sendmail, Inc folks would clarify the scope of the license. If there's no danger to co-shipped proprietary code, then it can go in. Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au> Netplex Consulting To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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