Re: Where is the qmail Licence?

Frank Louwers <[email protected]> wrote:
> > 
> > Not at all.  Spend a few hours reading the other documents at cr.yp.to;
> > other, legal questions are answered by asking a lawyer, not djb.
> 
> Yes, well. I've had my lawyer take at look at djb's sites a while ago.
> My lawyer said the are completely unclear, non-enforcable under Belgian
> law, and advised me not to do anything with this software :) I ignored
> his advise ...

Hmmm.  If you don't trust the advice of your lawyer, perhaps you should get a
different lawyer.

> Can anyone answer me whether it is legal for my company to install a
> tuned, modified (eg: added spamfilters, recompiled with a few patches,
> ...) qmail on a client's server, and ask money to set up the system?
> No one has given a decent answer to that question on this list the last
> year, and djb refuses to answer. Another question is: if we are not
> allowed to do this, what needs to be done to be allowed to do this?
> (license, whatever)

You can distribute unmodified copies of qmail.  You can distribute your
modifications in the form of a patch.  You can distribute binaries if and only
if they conform to djb's conditions.

If "installing qmail plus various other things plus doing configuration on a
client's server" is (by a legal definition) "distributing qmail", you're
hosed.  I have an opinion on whether that's the case, but I'm not a lawyer, so
my opinion doesn't count.

If the client has a legal copy of qmail already (i.e. downloaded it, or you
provided an unmodified tarball), and all you do is modify his copy for him,
that would appear to be the client paying you to modify his copy, which is a
right your client has according to djb.

Charles
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Charles Cazabon                        <[email protected]>
GPL'ed software available at:     http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/
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