The sad tale of qmail [LWN.net]

The sad tale of qmail

Posted Aug 24, 2006 16:01 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216)
In reply to: The sad tale of qmail by felixfix
Parent article: A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents - Part One

You need to add "license" to the criteria, and qmail shows why. It's a source-viewable, but NOT an open source license.
Here's one view:
http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html#license

And the problems it causes:
http://www.whirlycott.com/phil/2004/12/16/lovehateqmail/
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/

I've read some claims that OSI approved this as an OSS license,
but I think that's a false claim. In particular, it's not listed here:
http://opensource.org/licenses/

You can't distributed precompiled binaries, and the source code doesn't even compile any more as-is.

(Log in to post comments)

The sad tale of qmail

Posted Aug 24, 2006 17:42 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

I think you can distribute precompiled binaries as long as they are strictly from the original unpatched sources, which became worthless when the first patch was issued.