Packages RFC

[Konstantin Riabitsev]

On Sun, 2003-10-26 at 12:21, Jos Vos wrote:
> > I doubt qmail is of interest to Fedora, but what about the others? Want
> > them passed on?
> 
> Qmail has a non-Open Source license.

Allow me to add to that. The Qmail license strictly prohibits
distribution of modified sources, and the same goes for binaries. This
makes distribution of qmail for modern-day systems downright impossible,
since Qmail does not compile at all on gcc-3.x. There is a patch that
works around this problem, but, of course, one is not allowed to
distribute binaries with this patch applied, so distributing legal
binaries for a gcc-3 based system is therefore impossible. If this
sounds nuts -- it is.

(e.g. see http://linux.duke.edu/~icon/misc/qmail/debacle.html for a very
lively conversation that I had with the qmail-dist list when I was
looking to become a distributor myself. There are some real pearls in
there).

Due to its murky and restrictive license, I'm pretty sure that Qmail
will never appear in Fedora Core.

I myself would like to get out of distributing it, but that involves a
migration effort. :)

Regards,
-- 
Konstantin Riabitsev <icon at linux.duke.edu>
Linux at DUKE