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qmail
qmail
Posted May 27, 2004 15:32 UTC (Thu) by kurtm (guest, #4070)Parent article: Movable type and "almost free" software
Just a couple comments. You linked to the qmail.org site and not qmail's official site at http://cr.yp.to/qmail.html.
Also, I've been looking at building an email infrastructure, and I've decided to go with qmail. When I looked at the release number and date, I thought immediately of abandonware. However, one trap I feel the free software community has gotten into is thinking that a lack of releases equates to abandoned.
Yes, a lack of security updates definitely makes one think 'abandoned'. But it seems that too often 'lack of more features' is thought of in the same way. Why do our tools need to keep getting more complex? Is a Craftsman Hammer useless if it's design hasn't changed in 20 years?
I *do* feel that djb should address the linux compilation issues. However, the rest of qmail *works*. The add-ons that lots of people use are just that, add-ons.
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qmail
Posted May 27, 2004 16:29 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
I think there is some value in the occasional insignificant tweak just to let people know you're still paying attention. With software, there's no effort to duplication, so you need to do something to let people know if it's still supported. With physical objects, they won't be for sale new after 20 years if they're not still in production, so you can tell that they're still available by looking in a catalogue. (And this could be worthwhile; Craftsman's lifetime warranty is less useful if they stopped making new ones 20 years ago). I think it's not so much new features that people want as signs of life. (Unless, of course, there are particular new features that they want)
qmail
Posted May 27, 2004 17:41 UTC (Thu) by kurtm (guest, #4070) [Link]
So djb should essentially just bump the version number occasionally so people know the project is supported? I don't understand otherwise what 'some value in the occasional insignificant tweak' would mean.Unfortunately, I think 'signs of life' in this case means 'convenient signs of life'. There is a rather active qmail mailing list. People don't want to do more work than looking at the version number (and maybe when it was released).
Yes, often no releases in a while can be an indicator of abandonware, but it is just an indicator.
I think there are two traps that get us to think this way: 1) Most proprietary software companies (and hardware companies for that matter) have trained us to think that stuff more than 18 months old is useless. and 2) Because so much free software is being released before it is ready and/or while it is still evolving that we assume anything that doesn't make new releases all the time is not being maintained.
qmail
Posted May 27, 2004 18:17 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
On the other hand, when there have been no releases for six years, and the current release does not even compile on a modern Linux system, many observers must wonder if the code is being maintained at all...
qmail license
Posted Jun 4, 2004 19:52 UTC (Fri) by bodosom (subscriber, #3774) [Link]
There's been endless wrangling in the past about the qmail license and what it means. Although DJB hasn't made much new code recently he has updated the documents to clarify certain things.1) You can't distribute a modified qmail without his permission. Most distros don't want to deal with the anti-LSB DJB so they don't seek permission.
2) You can distribute a package (e.g. deb, rpm, pkg) that changes qmail in the post-install. This requires a build enviroment (compiler etc.). Some folks consider this an unwarranted imposition.
3) You can distribute binaries that give the net result of building a set of pristine sources. You can also make useful links to those binaries.
4) New Linux (the errno problem) is unsupported. This is awkward but not fatal given 2.
The key thing is that while you can create a derivative work you cannot redstribute it (at least not and call it qmail). His license is not like other free/open source licenses but you can achieve the same end result.
I'm just saying... (rather tardily too).
qmail
Posted May 28, 2004 14:17 UTC (Fri) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link]
"Convenient" signs of life can be important for someone deciding whether to install some program. It doesn't have to be feature creep or arbitrary version bumping. Some sort of notice on the project's homepage would suffice: "[28-05-04] We're still looking at including nifty feature X", or "[01-01-04] This product is now considered stable. We have no immediate plans to add new features, but bug reports are always welcome and we'll keep an eye out for needed security fixes. If there's any change to this status, we'll document it here."I was recently looking at alternatives to CVS, and one that caught my eye was OpenCM, which has what appears to be a unique cryptographic authentication feature (unless you want to run Apache behind Subversion). The latest release, however, is an alpha for 0.1.2, and that was almost a year and a half ago. It took a fair amount of digging to find out that this _isn't_ abandonware, it's just going through a major restructuring. That makes me feel a lot better about considering it, but it took awhile to figure out. That's time that could have been spent elsewhere to greater benefit.