On Tue, 14 Nov 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I'm confused. How exactly does any of this affect the ability of people
> to download the source and examine/use it to determine if it's secure
> or not? After all, wasn't that the point of the discussion?
>
Some folks who are capable of doing good audit work won't spend their time
on projects that don't have the right license. This is either because
they would rather spend their time contributing work towards their
favorite license, or because there might later be accusation that someone
stole code from qmail, and used it in another product with an incompatible
license. For example, there was a flap recently when some MS code may
have been stolen. There was concern that if any Samba teams members saw
the code, they couldn't work on the project anymore; they'd be "tainted".
There are some OS distributions that will only include code of a
particular license, and some of those do code audits.
So, the license can have some affect on how much review a program
gets. No, in general the license won't stop people whose motivation is to
publish holes, or who want to use qmail for themselves.
Ryan
