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Re: DEPLOY: Microsoft Royalty Free Sender ID Patent License FAQ

2004-08-26 12:49:38

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, wayne wrote:

This is incorrect. Qmail *is* being maintained, just not by DJB.  As I
mentioned in my first post[1] about possible qmail conflicts with the
SenderID license, the qmail community has to use patches to maintain
the program.  This makes life hard, but apparently, enough people like
it that qmail is still one of the most popular MTAs (possibly the second
most popular after sendmail).

So in spite of its burdensome and open source incompatible license, qmail
has *still* managed to see wide deployment.  (Some would say that qmail's
license is /wildly/ more restrictive than Sender ID's).

The possibility that requiring every single user of qmail to get a
signed license from Microsoft is a reason for concern.  (Yes, this is
orders of magnitude more work than the patches that qmail users have
to do.)

The license requires no such thing from end-users of qmail that are
applying patches.

You are right, we should not be constrained by licensing terms of
packages.  We should, however be constrained by deployment issues.

You are exactly right.  So what's the issue? ;)

-Rand


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