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DJB Releases All Source to Public Domain
A Sage Developer writes "During a recent conference, Sage Days 6, Dan Bernstein (who has recently come under attack for his licensing policy) was among the invited speakers. During a panel discussion on the future of open source mathematics software, Bernstein declared that all of his past and future code would be released to the public domain. This includes qmail, primegen, and a number of other projects. Given the headache that incompatibility between GPLv3 and GPLv2 is causing developers, will we see more of this?"
No.
Not in a manner disproportionate to what we've seen in the past anyway. Some people will keep gpl2 as their license, others will go gpl3, bsd, or one of any of the OSI licenses for the most part, because people like attribution, they like retaining (some) control of their work.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
It's an ironic twist that native Americans have been attached to the term "indian giver" when it was primarily the White Man who harbored ulterior motives when presenting gifts to the natives.
If you share, share. If you don't want to share, don't share. It used to be as easy as that. The GPL and its derivatives introduced a weird twist on the sharing that if you partake in the sharing, you must also share alike. This makes sense in the software world since a copy to you doesn't mean that I am deprived of a copy for myself. Sharing is something that you ought to do. The GPL pushes that one step further by making sharing a requirement. Now receiving obliges you to give in return (if copyright wasn't the basis for the GPL, would Stallman have required distribution too?).
It all got so confusing, and now with GPL3 putting further restrictions on sharers, I think we are seeing a bit of backlash. Not only because it is difficult to reconcile differences between implementations under GPL2 with the newer version, but also because the greater restrictions are a smack in the face to the original reason anyone wanted to get involved in the first place, i.e. to share.
Sharing is a good thing, and should be encouraged. But to try to regulate every single loophole and corner case is going too far. Public domain remains the last safe haven for shareable code. Good on DJB.
I really like DJB approach in many programs but his daemon as services makes his good programs difficult to use. /etc/init.d , that will be cool.
I would like to use dnscache as a normal daemon, one below the
The crypto software and FFT software especially so, but maintenance isn't always as hot. That's hardly DJB's fault - they are public domain and nobody has run with them. On the other hand, it is not acceptable that his software is not being properly distributed, promoted or documented. Nor is it acceptable that he allows his personality quirks to interfere with the primary purpose of getting code into active circulation.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I suppose then that now there is nothing to stop developers from implementing a fork of qmail that will use libc (and indeed, to absorb into libc anything worthy from qmail). So the race is on! Will gqmail or kqmail be the first to distribute said fork?
First of all, not contributing them towards the libc's is sociopathic behaviour (I want only my app to benefit, everyone else go suck bricks sidewise through a thin straw).
This is ludicrous. He wrote them because the ones out there weren't good enough. Others can write their own. There is nothing sociopathic about closed source software, no matter how much you may wish it to be.
(It is probably in the realm of sociopathy, as we're using the term, to go after people who reverse engineer your compiled binaries, but that's entirely different from not giving them your code. If they can extract what they need from what you have chosen given them, good for them. It is always wise to remember that while the GPL and the Free Software movement are in favor of unlimited user rights, a developer choosing to exert his own rights is not wrong.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to use qmail.
From a system administrator's point of view qmail does NOT keep adequate logging to track the flow of a message through X MTAs. With Postfix or Sendmail (and I reckon Exim too), I can see the entire flow in the logs. If you ever worked for a company such as an ISP or where someone complained about email gone missing, stuff like this is lifesaving.
From a programmer point of view DJB's software is just the antithesis of everything decent programming stands for, magic variables, awkward named variables, undsoweiter.
No thank you. I prefer to stick with Postfix (after many years of Sendmail).
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Did he try sending a bug report to the printer manufacturer? Wouldn't that have saved him a lot of silly bother?
Why don't you do a modicum of research and find out? The story has been presented far and wide by RMS himself, and is easy enough to find. What you insinuate is that the trouble fixing the printer was somehow RMSes fault, which history shows to be untrue. The printer manufacturer wouldn't acknowledge the problem, and refused to let RMS see the source code so he could "fix" a bug they wouldn't acknowledge. This irrespective of how often said bug bit their customers. RMS spotted a severe social/technical problem and wrote the GPL to solve it (which it does, very successfully). Unscrupulous people have sought out loopholes to subvert the GPL, hence GPL v2, and now, with the advent of MS's "trusted computing initiative" and tivoization, GPL v3 to protect those freedoms in the face of some very powerful entities manipulating very powerful copyright and patent laws with the intent of subverting, even destroying, those same freedoms.
The GPL v2 and v3 are, whatever else one may say, the most successful attempt so far at creating a "constitution" that protects users rights in perpetuity, within the current framework of law designed to do just the opposite. It may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than most options out there.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
>His software was actually not open source !
Uh!?, his software was open source from the start. It had restricted distribution of the modifications on the software source, but the source was open all the way. Even Microsoft have open source software!!
Its method of storing its database as raw inodes is... mildly frightening, to say the least.
Huh? Why? I mean, I'm no qmail zealot, but if you're afraid of storing data in your filesystem, you have far *far* bigger problems.
And over the years I've seen all of those mail clients exploited at one time or another, yet my qmail gateways have never been exploited through qmail. Odd that.
It makes restoring from backup difficult, for one thing, unless you use an exact image of the disk with a partition the exact same size. I don't, I use file-level backups. Or maybe I want to move qmail to a different disk or volume. I mean, on one hand, it's freaking email queue, who gives a damn. But it's the principle of the thing.
Random and weird software I've written.
> For many others, myself included, the price for that code is far too high (dictating release terms for my own software).
It's not your own software and I think that's the problem here. Even BSD software that you incorporate isn't your own software. In fact, the only way it COULD be your own software is if you chose the GPL as the license, in which case you could still use it any damn way you please because you don't license your own software to yourself.
Thus, you're saying that you mind someone else dictating release terms for their own software because you want to do it yourself. If you want to argue against something, at least make sure you can think straight first. You seem to think that you own other people's software just because it's BSD or public domain. Further, you hate the GPL for "dictating release terms" because you want to dictate them for what is actually other people's software that you've convinced yourself is your own.
If you're going to complain, at least take care to understand exactly what code belongs to whom and when and how licenses apply. Or maybe that's why you don't like the GPL? Because it points out that other people's code isn't yours when you're to lazy, intellectually, to keep that straight?