Fedora and RedHat's autism toward personal users
Mike A. Harris
mharris at redhat.com
Wed Oct 15 12:00:32 UTC 2003
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, 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.
While I personally believe it is unlikely that we'd be adding a
new MTA to the Fedora Core itself anytime soon, alternative MTAs
without legal or licensing issues sound perfect for 'Fedora
Alternatives' in the long term, and maintained outside Red Hat.
--
Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
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