Re: Where is the qmail Licence?

This is just my opinion. Consult a(nother :) lawyer for a real answer.

As far as I can tell from the scant information given at cr.yp.to and
the generally accepted installed userbase of qmail: 
1) it is legal for an individual or company to download qmail from a
qmail mirror, install it, apply patches to it and run it on as many
computers as they like. 

From this we can deduce:
2) Since companies and universities can install it, it is obvious that
it is ok to pay employees to perform this work on behalf of the
organisation.

The law (certainly in Europe) draws little distinction in liability or
rights between an employee, contractor or agent. 
3) Therefore it is legal for an organisation to install qmail via an
employee contractor or agent. Therefore if you inform the buyer in the
small print that you as a company are acting as their employee
contractor or agent in performing the installation of qmail, then you
are not breaking the law if you install qmail on a computer, patch it,
compile it and sell it to them.

Since all this sums up to the fact that djb's 'licence' appears to
toothless, it lead me to seek clarification as to what the actual
licence is. More importantly, I understand that if he fails to take
action against people to appear to have violated his licence (like
plisk) then he is in fact showing that their actions are not illegal and
are in fact a valid interpretation of the licence. 

Which leads us to the point where it seems you can do anything you like. 

I find this a rather unhealthy situation. It appears that many on this
forum think djb did not mean the source to be open in this way, but
there is little evidence for their beliefs. Statements such as 'spend a
few hours reading the whole of cr.yp.to' suggest that they too cannot
find any concrete evidence for their statements. (A few hours??? Even
the M$ licences are not THAT long - are you serious????).

The fact that they continue to invest in software they have no control
over shows a surprising naivety (the pervading thought seem to be: It's
better to run qmail than to run sendmail, therefore the licence doesn't
matter). 

As far as I can tell there is nothing to stop djb or his estate selling
the rights to qmail and then pulling the rug from under all their feet.
The only glimmer of hope is that when grey suits have tried this in the
past (remember the .GIF copyright debacle?) it has backfired. 

-Andy

Frank Louwers wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 08:05:53AM -0600, Charles Cazabon wrote:
> > Frank Louwers <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > > the problem is that dan refuses to specify:
> >
> > 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 ...
> 
> 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)
> 
> Kind Regards,
> Frank Louwers
> 
> --
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