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?"

Comments

Re:That may be good.

[arivanov]

Actually, if you like qmail you need to have your brain checked.

The biggest advantage of Unix is the "We stood on the shoulders of Giants" philosophy. The library functions are continually improved and nowdays there is a library function for nearly everything. Qmail goes completely against this philosophy by rewriting nearly every higher level function in libc it needs. Granted, when qmail came out some of these rewrites were more secure and technically superior implementations. 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). Second, their technical superiority even from a security perspective is no longer there. Libc has moved on and even the worst of them (HPUX and Irix) are now at the same level of the DJB replacements (or better).

Re:That may be good.

[arivanov]

No point. The MTAs have moved forward as well. The libraries have moved forward as well. It would have been interesting 10 years ago (I used it and advocated its use at that time).

Now it is pointless.

Postfix, Exim and even sendmail have made a giant leap forward in terms of code quality, performance and security. So have the underlying libraries.

There simply no point to use qmail or any of its code base now. Too little, too late.