In message <20010426083939.A16108 at sherohman.org>, Dave Sherohman writes: > 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. IMHO, my disagreement with it comes from a Debian perspective, not an RMS one. DJB puts his application files in a non-standard hierarchy, one that violates Debian policy by default. Technically, by customizing the make process to put files in the right place in a Debian system, it would be considered an altered binary format; the very thing he is restricting distribution on. Currently, the only practical way to distribute qmail on Debian is by providing the source tarball with a patch and control file. The user can then download the source, build it, and install it with a command like: bash# apt-get source qmail --compile bash# dpkg --install <location of qmail deb> There is ONE clause he could add to his license to make it more flexible but still retain the control he desires. That clause would be to allow binary distributions of altered source as long as both the original tarball and the patch used to alter it were made available by the packaging party. > 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. I would agree with you here, wholeheartedly. -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> | a.k.a. ^chewie http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr Key fingerprint = B4AB D627 9CBD 687E 7A31 1950 0CC7 0B18 206C 5AFD