spf-discuss
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Re: The New SPF: overall outline

2004-05-20 15:50:39
On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 15:27, Paul Iadonisi wrote:

  Please *don't* forget the GPL.  While it's obvious from my signature
that I quite adamantly favor the GPL, I don't dislike the BSD, Apache,
MIT/X, and other similar licenses.  (For the record, I'm a sendmail
bigot, even though it is not covered under the GPL.)  But the simple
fact is that the GPL does not allow the inclusion of technology that
requires a patent license that is anything other than RF.

Although I did not mention, I inferred "patent free" and "royalty
free".  In fact, I intended to relay generally the meaning of "FREE" in
the truest sense of the word.

  And because there are at least three MTAs that are covered by the GPL
(exim, courier-mta, and PowerMail), a RAND patent encumbered technology
would have the potential of unfairly eliminating these MTAs from the
market.
  I didn't comment on the BSD, Apache, MIT/X or other similiar licenses
only because I don't know enough about them to know how patents can
interfere (or not) with software covered by those licenses.  So I'm not
trying to turn this into an off topic license debate.  Just stating GPL
compatibility is an important aspect with something as crucial as an
SMTP extension and other infrastructure related changes to protocols.

I have nothing against the GPL, in fact its quite suited to many things,
but it can impede commercial use, and this is something Sean and I tried
to address when we chose the license for libspf.  The goal was to not
exclude anyone or anything from free and open use of said software.

Cheers,

James

-- 
James Couzens,
Programmer
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