Not fair! qmail, Mozilla Firefox ... [LWN.net]

Not fair! qmail, Mozilla Firefox ...

Posted Jun 3, 2004 13:34 UTC (Thu) by job (subscriber, #670)
Parent article: Movable type and "almost free" software

The qmail bashing is completely unfounded. 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. This is because the authors feel afraid
that modified versions would not be up to their standards. In my personal
opinion, the fear is unfounded, but we have what we have and these
packages are good, almost-free, software.

There are indeed new versions of qmail from time to time, but it is
called net-qmail. It is not hard to find, just go to qmail.org and look
under "download". You will find that the software when compiling applies
patches to an (included) standard qmail source tree, much like LAME did
in the beginning, but that is a technicality only.

These licenses where you are allowed to develop but not do formal
releases, that may or may not conflict with the author's, are not
uncommon. I mentioned Firefox but LaTeX has a similar license. It may be
a bit sad, but bashing one in particular won't help. You need to stick to
facts in order to have a meaningful discussion.

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Not fair! qmail, Mozilla Firefox ...

Posted Jun 4, 2004 18:21 UTC (Fri) by bayard (guest, #20385) [Link]

> You need to stick to facts in order to have a meaningful discussion.

Isn't it true that the only trademark encumbered parts of Firefox are
Netscape brand items (such as the "N" logo) and Firefox can be built
without them, losing hardly any functionality?

That is the impression I get reading the 'copyright' file in Debian
mozilla-firefox package, anyway. Would you care to clarify?

Not fair! qmail, Mozilla Firefox ...

Posted Jan 3, 2006 7:51 UTC (Tue) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

"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