Not fair! qmail, Mozilla Firefox ...

Not fair! qmail, Mozilla Firefox ...

Posted Jan 3, 2006 7:51 UTC (Tue) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943)
In reply to: Not fair! qmail, Mozilla Firefox ... by job
Parent article: Movable type and "almost free" software

"job" wrote:

qmail is not less free than Mozilla Firefox! You are not allowed to redistribute modified versions of any of them. Firefox protects this with their trademark license, qmail in another way, but it is the same restriction.

You can fork Firefox, i.e., distribute derivative works in either source or binary form and use them for any purpose, provided you don't call it Mozilla or Firefox. That's what Flock is, after all.

qmail's generous but proprietary licence does not permit that. For example, the netqmail authors have (commendably) done absolutely the maximum possible to make the problem minimal, but neither they nor anyone else (except Prof. Bernstein) may lawfully distribute it in any binary form.

It would be nice if qmail advocates would content themselves with having a well-performing and generally secure if aging MTA, and not continually attempt to stretch the truth past the breaking point.

LaTeX has a similar license.

Not exactly. Knuth said: "The program for TeX is in the public domain, and readers may freely incorporate the algorithms of this book into their own programs. However, the use of the name TeX is restricted to software systems that agree exactly with the program presented here." (His typefaces have a similar restriction, and some country-specific hyphenation-pattern files are restricted. It's a rather muddled situation.)

The LaTeX code itself, aside from encumbered pieces from Knuth and some other TUG members, is open source under LPPL v. 1.3.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

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