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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.
Sigh. No, it doesn't. The GPL sets forth rules you need to follow if you choose to share (i.e. distribute) the software. But nothing in the GPL obliges you to share anything.
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).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
How is it confusing?
The restrictions are essentially closing loopholes whereby people could either avoid sharing or share something useless.
Under GPLv2, you could create a derivative work and run a website based on it, but not share the changes since you weren't technically distributing the software. Or you could create a signed binary, and hardware that won't run it unless that binary is exactly the same. Or you could patent some procedure used, so that people can see the source code, but if they do anything with it, they violate your patent.
All GPLv3 does is enforce the spirit of GPLv2. Specifically: Everyone has to be able to get the source code, make any change they want, recompile, and run the modified binary.
If you're getting hit with these restrictions, chances are, you, yourself, are an "indian giver" -- you want to pretend to share, except, not really.
Or GPLv2... or BSD... or Apache... or MIT...
You're suggesting that GPLv3 somehow "infected" GPLv2, or every other license out there. That's simply not true. While public domain is perhaps the only way to ensure your code can be included in any kind of project, I see nothing wrong with share alike, and I see no reason why closing the loopholes is "going too far".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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."
Right, since there isn't a standard right now...
That's why I called it "trying".
Well, init.d is complete in the sense that brainfuck is Turing-complete.
Which is to say, it's actually awkward for quite a lot of things. For instance: networking.
On Gentoo, the way multiple network interfaces are dealt with is by assigning each of them an init script, all symlinked to the same one. Gentoo init scripts have dependencies, so I can have something depend on some or all of the network interfaces being up.
On Debian, this is dealt with by having one "networking" init script that then ties into its own init-like system for individual interfaces -- ifup/ifdown. I can force certain scripts to run after an interface comes up or goes down.
On Ubuntu desktops, this is dealt with by having a NetworkManager daemon (started by init.d) that handles everything itself, by communicating with a GUI. I'm fairly sure it uses ifup/ifdown in some way, as it seems to respect some of my static scripts.
Gentoo is the closest to the "right way", in that there's a unified way to start/stop something. That is, on Gentoo, I know I can stop a network device by doing /etc/init.d/net.eth1 stop. But Ubuntu's the most user-friendly way, because I can do it from a GUI, and, for instance, easily migrate between wireless networks.
Now, go read about upstart, for a completely different approach. In particular, the ability to receive "events" from, say, udev or HAL, means that the equivalent of "/etc/init.d/net.eth1 start" will be run when I plug a cable into eth1, without removing that functionality, or forcing it into a completely different system (ifup/down).
At least, that's how I think it would work. In practice, while Upstart is used in Ubuntu, it's mostly used just to launch all the old sysv rc scripts, which then launch things like NetworkManager.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Exchange!
From http://cr.yp.to/qmail/dist.html:
I hereby place the qmail package (in particular, qmail-1.03.tar.gz, with MD5 checksum 622f65f982e380dbe86e6574f3abcb7c) into the public domain. You are free to modify the package, distribute modified versions, etc.