On Wed, Apr 25, 2001 at 09:48:30PM -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > Dave Sherohman <esper at sherohman.org> writes: > > You're not allowed to distribute modified binaries of qmail. If you make a > > change, it won't be available to anyone else unless either that someone else > > is willing to compile from source or DJB makes it part of the official > > version. Forking is right out. > > And some people say this is a *bad* thing. Sheesh. Depends on what you mean by "bad". DJB's not wrong to choose that restriction. IMO, he has every right to dictate how his code may be used and this is not an unreasonable restriction. RMS may have ethical problems with it, but I don't. However, from a practical standpoint, I think it's a bad choice. As a developer, I'm less likely to burn my time working on a project that I can't fork if the maintainer is completely unreasonable[1] or for some reason stops maintaining the project. Any decision which causes developers to turn away reduces the value of the open source process. If many eyeballs make all bugs shallow, then fewer eyeballs will leave places for bugs to hide. [1] Although I've never dealt with him and have no opinion of my own on the topic, many people seem to think that DJB is already unreasonable by default. -- That's not gibberish... It's Linux. - Byers, The Lone Gunmen Geek Code 3.1: GCS d? s+: a- C++ UL++$ P++>+++ L+++>++++ E- W--(++) N+ o+ !K w---$ O M- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t 5++ X+ R++ tv b+ DI++++ D G e* h+ r y+