Fedora and RedHat's autism toward personal users

[Gordon Messmer]

Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
> Gordon Messmer wrote:
> 
>>Qmail's license precludes its being distributed as part of Fedora.  As
>>an alternative, I would suggest Courier-MTA:  http://www.courier-mta.org/
> 
> 
> http://cr.yp.to/distributors.html

I'm well aware of qmail's license.  It's been discussed here on a number 
of occasions past.  Specifically, that page notes:

You may distribute a precompiled package if installing your package 
produces exactly the same files, in exactly the same locations, that a 
user would obtain by installing one of my packages listed

That alone is enough to prevent distribution.  A distributor can not 
ship bug fixes in a binary form.  You can debate it all you want, but I 
suggest that you look at the previous debates instead.

I know of a number of people who still use qmail, and are very fond of 
it.  That's very well and good, but the license is going to keep qmail 
in the hands of the people who want to build it for themselves, and out 
of distributions that care about Free Software.

>>Courier is configured very much like qmail (and resembles qmail in a
>>number of other ways), but is actively maintained and supports all of
>>the features you'd expect in a modern mailer.  You can't really say that
>>of qmail.
> 
> 
> I think that postfix is enough, but zmailer is much better ;-) http://www.zmailer.org

Courier can't be compared directly to postfix or zmailer, since it 
provides much more than they do.  Courier is a complete mail system, 
providing the MTA, POP/IMAP/SMAP servers, webmail, the MDA, the fax 
server, and the mail list manager.  All of those components are 
optional, and pretty much all of them can be replaced with common 
components (it'll interoperate with what you're currently using, if 
that's what you want).