Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 02:42:10 +0800 From: Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au> To: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@pencil-box.village.org> Cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG>, dima@best.net, committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Release schedule for 2.2.7 Message-ID: <199806291842.CAA02820@spinner.netplex.com.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 29 Jun 1998 10:45:23 CST." <199806291645.KAA00255@pencil-box.village.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
"M. Warner Losh" wrote: > In message <10114.898670894@time.cdrom.com> "Jordan K. Hubbard" writes: > : Even for the embedded > : customers, it's no worse than GPL'd - they have to distribute the > : sendmail sources or make them available on demand. > > How many embedded customers use sendmail... Is that next toaster I'm > going to buy send me email whenever the bread gets stuck? Or, give sendmail away at cost and you can get out of this too. The license is only a problem if you want to take sendmail and integrate it within another proprietary product (eg: a mail transport system) where your modified sendmail binaries are not freely distributable. If your toaster had sendmail binaries on it's hard disk and the users were probibited from copying the sendmail binaries by license, then you'd need to make another arrangement. In just about every other case you could pretty much argue that you were supplying binaries for free (or at media/ distribution cost), so it's really a non-issue. The 8.9.1-beta license is more specific about the scope of the term "Source Code", it explicitly says sendmail only. Don't forget the intent of the license. Sendmail, Inc is funding sendmail development with the aim of being able to make a product out of it. Having the freeware version being freely available and widespread is central to their strategy. However, Sendmail Inc (naturally enough) don't want to fund development of the freeware product if some other company can pick up what they've been funding and integrating it into another product to compete directly with them. They couldn't really give a damn whether your toaster uses sendmail to send you mail if the bread gets stuck or the toast is starting to burn. :-) However, if your toaster had 20GB of disk space, multiple ethernet connectors, a mail configuration GUI and apparently was more designed to administer and host large mail sites (username@toaster.org) than to actually toast bread, then you might have trouble. Compare the Sendmail license (the new version with the wording cleaned up) with something like the SleepyCat DBv2 license. The sendmail license is an order of magitude less ominous than the DBv2 license - that one explicitly requires the source for *everything* to be distributed. > Warner Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au> Netplex Consulting To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199806291842.CAA02820>