Bind v. TinyDNS

[Rui Miguel Seabra]

On Fri, 2004-01-02 at 17:19, Ron Bickers wrote:
> On 01/02/2004 9:42 AM, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-01-02 at 14:31, David C. Hart wrote:
> >>I have TinyDNS patched and running (if I want). Does anyone have any
> >>strong feelings one way or the other vs Bind on Fedora C1?
> > Yes, I do. As most if not all Dan J. Bernstein's software,
> >   TinyDNS is NEITHER Free Software nor Open Source Software.
> 
> I do too.  DJB software is both free for you to use and the source is
> available for free.

BE CAREFUL please, when I speak of Free Software I am not talking about
software that you can get for ZERO price but of software that has a
license that grants an user 4 basic Freedoms:

   0. the freedom to run the program for any purpose
   1. the freedom to study the program and adapt it for your needs
   2. the freedom to distribute copies
   3. the freedom to publish improved versions

As is immediate to anyone skilled in computing, access to source code is
a requirement to fulfill freedoms 1 and 3.

For a detailed explanation please see:
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
For an alternative version (although not exactly the same) there is the
9 item list of things a license must fulfill to be an Open Source
license, check http://www.opensource.org -- although I think Free
Software is much more than a technically better way to make software.

You can check on both sites against DJB's license, and you'll quickly
see that it is NEITHER Free Software nor Open Source Software.

>   Whatever other limitations it has on distribution is
> irrelevant to me, though clearly not to many OSS purists.  There's nothing
> wrong with that, I guess -- except they're missing out on some great software.

DJB's software is actually PROPRIETARY software WITH ACCESS to source code.
It just happens to be gratis, as well.

It may be technically perfect in terms of security, but that only adds up
evidence to those that say Free Software is more than good security too,
since proprietary software can also be very secure.

Since I don't want to use any non-Free software, I won't use DJB's
software. That doesn't mean I'm missing software, postfix and exim are
both safer than sendmail, and postfix follows a design similar to DJB's
(in terms of security) and IS Free Software.

> I've been using tinydns for a *long* time and like all DJB software, it is
> very high quality -- reliable, secure, easy to understand and manage, and a
> whole lot of other things BIND is not.

Windows is also said to be of very high quality, reliable, secure, easy
to understand and manage, and a whole lot of other things GNU/Linux is
not.

I just care to check all details and filter out the garbage as the
sources come and go :)

Of course that phrase above would become:

Windows is also said to be a whole lot of other things GNU/Linux is not.

<grin style="decoration: evil;"/>

Rui

-- 
+ No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown
+ Whatever you do will be insignificant,
| but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi
+ So let's do it...?

Please AVOID sending me WORD, EXCEL or POWERPOINT attachments.
See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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