On Mon, Jan 04, 1999 at 12:40:14PM -0500, Dave Sill wrote:
> Apprently I need to nail *both* feet to the floor. Okay. Let me know
> which of the following statements you disagree with.
>
> 1) Red Hat ships sendmail.
>
> 2) Red Hat doesn't ship qmail, zmailer, exim, smail, or any other OSS
> sendmail equivalent.
Note: Redhat uses qmail, and understands its capabilities and
advantages vs. zmailer (can't handle large queues w/o completely
bogging down), exim (monolithic design), smail (waaaaaaay out of
date, many versions were quite insecure), vmailer (still
no-where near close to completion).
> 5) Licensing doesn't prevent Red Hat from shipping zmailer, exim,
> smail, or any other OSS sendmail equivalent.
>
> Question: *Why doesn't* Red Hat ship zmailer, exim, smail, or any
> other OSS sendmail equivalent?
I've postulated an answer earlier in this thread. I pretty much
repeat it above. The answer I percieve is that qmail is the only
mailer that's convincingly so much better then sendmail that it can
act as an alternative.
> My Guess: Inertia: too hard to change, not enough incentive to change,
> belief that sendmail is good enough, etc.
No O'Reilly book, either. Yet.
> >So let's have all OSS authors stop writing code, because they can't ensure
> >that all complaints due to broken packaging will go to the responsible
> >vendor. Let's recall Apache, sendmail, Inn, and Bind, and withdraw them
> >from distribution. Clearly the OSS scheme doesn't work, and generates
> >horribly buggy installations.
>
> How about if we just let developers who don't want to make their code
> OSS set their own terms based on their beliefs and desires?
Why is it that everyone treats software as though only one license
were possible at a time? Software can be released under multiple
licenses at the same time. It has been suggested (long ago) that to
satisfy the need for modification djb could release qmail under the
condition that if the software was modified then it could no longer be
called qmail. Why not go one step further? Why not release 2
tarballs with 2 different licenses. One called qmail-1.03.tar.gz, one
called
djb-is-not-responsible-for-this-mailer,contact-your-explicitive-deleted-vendor.tar.gz,
with the latter being modifiable, copyright djb, with no support and
no mention of qmail or djb allowed anywhere except to declare that he
has no responsability for anything that happens in a distribution
containing it, and that any vendors or users of the package who claim
that he is responsible for problems subject themselves to liable, or
whatever djb feels is legally necessary for him to protect his good
name.
-Peter
