On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 7:54 PM, li...@rhsoft.net <li...@rhsoft.net> wrote:
>
>
> Am 21.04.2014 01:43, schrieb Rick Zeman:
>> First let me say that I'm NOT trying to start any sort of flame war
>> here, and I tried to google to find out the answer before asking.
>> That being said, I just installed OpenBSD in a VM and ran into this:
>>
>> "Some commonly asked questions about third-party products:
>>
>> Why isn't Postfix included?
>> The license is not free, and thus can not be considered."
>
> usually you should download the tarball of any software
> and seek for a document called "LICENSE" which in case
> of postfix starts with:
>
>>> IBM PUBLIC LICENSE VERSION 1.0 - SECURE MAILER
>>>
>>> THE ACCOMPANYING PROGRAM IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS IBM PUBLIC
>>> LICENSE ("AGREEMENT"). ANY USE, REPRODUCTION OR DISTRIBUTION OF THE
>>> PROGRAM CONSTITUTES RECIPIENT'S ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AGREEMENT.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postfix_%28software%29
> Postfix is released under the IBM Public License 1.0 which is a free software
> licence.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Public_License
>
> This license has also been criticised because of provisions in section 4
> which require commercial distributors of code covered by this license to
> indemnify all "upstream" originators for legal costs relating to lawsuits
> brought about of users of the software. It has been argued that this exposes
> small distributors (e.g. Linux distributions that happen to sell CDs) to
> unbounded
> legal costs, possibly arising from vexatious claims
> ______________________________________
>
> "free" needs a context, the GPL is free, but you are not
> free to use GPL licesed code, change it, include it in
> a commercial product and make your product closed source
Yeah, I've seen the Postfix license text more time than I can count
(in every config file, too), and I evenread that wiki page.
However the line
The IBM Public License (IPL) is a free software / open-source software
license written and sometimes used by IBM. It is approved by the Open
Source Initiative and is described as a "free software license" by the
Free Software Foundation(FSF).
to me reaffirmed not contravened Postfix's "freeness" since I would
think that something called the "Free Software Foundation" might be
considered somewhat authoritative?
