qmail license [LWN.net]

qmail license

Posted Jun 4, 2004 19:52 UTC (Fri) by bodosom (subscriber, #3774)
In reply to: qmail by corbet
Parent article: Movable type and "almost free" software

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).

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