Preemptive Comment
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| NoDough Dec 20, 2007 5:43 AM EDT |
Just to preempt everyone else who wants to say this. Qmail is not FOSS! Which is mostly true. It's also mostly true that its author can be a real jerk. However, he's a great coder and wrote a really good MTA. |
| hkwint Dec 20, 2007 6:41 AM EDT |
No, QMail isn't Free Software, it's even less restrictive, it's _officially_ in the public domain since Nov 2007! That means QMail _can_ be distributed as Free Software, but doesn't have to! |
| Sander_Marechal Dec 20, 2007 6:59 AM EDT |
@hkwint: That's great news! I didn't know that. Here's hoping that Debian Lenny will carry Qmail by default. @NoDough: IIRC form the license, Qmail was definately FOSS. Just under a rather strange license. IIRC you were free to do pretty much anything with the source, much like BSD. You just weren't allowed to distribute it in binary form. Granted, it probably wouldn't get an OSI stamp of approval, but it's most certainly open source! But it's a moot point now :-) |
| tuxchick Dec 20, 2007 7:23 AM EDT |
Sander, the original qmail license was rather like what some proprietary companies try to fob off as open source- you could do whatever you wanted in the privacy of your own home, and you could distribute patches, but you could not distribute modified binaries or sources. That's not FOSS, since modification and distribution, and even forking are fundamental to free software. Qmail is moldware, or even abandonware- it's been unmaintained since 2001, and I don't count all the random third-party source patches as maintenance. Maybe now that it's in the public domain someone will pick it up and maintain it properly. Most of its download mirrors don't work. It's outdated, doesn't work with newish compilers and libraries, has no clue of IPv6, and has a number of performance and behavior flaws that DJB would never admit were problems. I'm not touching it until someone else has suffered the pain of giving it a complete overhaul. |
| herzeleid Dec 20, 2007 10:27 AM EDT |
We looked at qmail a few years back as a possible replacement for sendmail, and it was just too gratuitously different, and came with it's own new set of issues to deal with. We ended up moving to postfix, which was a fairly painless migration, so bottom line, postfix provided performance and security improvements as a drop-in sendmail replacement. |
| NoDough Dec 20, 2007 12:58 PM EDT |
Quoting:it's _officially_ in the public domain since Nov 2007!I didn't know that. Kewl! Quoting:You just weren't allowed to distribute it in binary form.I was under the impression that changes could not be distributed in any form, although I could be mistaken... upon further reading, it seems TC's post clears it up. |
| Sander_Marechal Dec 20, 2007 2:06 PM EDT |
I looked it up. Indeed, modified sources were prohibited as well, so that makes it non-FOSS. |
| tuxchick Dec 20, 2007 2:20 PM EDT |
I'm curious if anything is going to come of DJB's code going into the public domain. There are, or used to be anyway, a lot of people who liked and used it. I used djbdns back before Maradns and Dnsmasq were around, but I had to leave it behind when it became too much hassle to get it to compile, plus it was falling behind in support for new DNS records. At the least DJB showed the way to nice clean simple DNS config files, rather than the Byzantine messes that BIND uses. |
| pat Dec 20, 2007 5:32 PM EDT |
http://www.qmail.org/netqmail/ will be the standard qmail distribution. Speaking of maradns... http://marc.info/?l=djbdns&m=119768310314462&w=2 , I just have to laugh when I read stuff like that from the critics, open mouth, insert foot. Djbdns can support all potential 65534 record types, unlike bind versions less than 9.1, it just has easy syntax for the most common. You just have to learn one more syntax for the other ones. http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/newtypes.html I wish more people would write software that is as secure and easy to use as DJB's. BTW, the post for this is pretty much advertising for a book by one of the qmail regulars. Read his bio, I would trust his opinion more that pretty much anyone in this thread (even mine). 8.4 MB source for the latest postfix build, guess it includes the kitchen sink. |
| tuxchick Dec 20, 2007 6:54 PM EDT |
There are currently 66 actual DNS record types, though maybe half of those are commonly used. tinydns has no native support for SRV, NAPTR, AAAA, and other records invented since the turn of the century. It does have a mechanism for supporting unknown records, including the other potential thousands, as this example SRV hack shows: :example.com:16: 16v=spf1 40mx 40-all:86400 Mmkay. I guess hacks like this are easier than actually maintaining the software. There's no need to mock Sam Trenholme- he promises an update to djbdns, which doesn't even have a current list of root nameservers. He authored and maintains a high-quality name server, which is more than DJB did, who abandoned his programs many years ago. Sam's criticisms were always polite and accurate, so I suspect his apology is a bit tongue-in-cheek. He has nothing to apologize for, unlike the rabid DJB fans who see the world as a zero-sum game: for DJBware to be good, everything else must be bad, and anyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid and must be flamed. Postfix includes a considerable amount of useful functionality, is efficient, and very reliable. I'm no coder, so I have no idea how much of that code is useless lard. But I do know that it's good-performing well-maintained code that doesn't have 1998 datestamps on it. DJB is not infallible, and neither are his programs. qmail had performance problems in its heyday that were never fixed, and it is not easy to use, but is a minefield of pitfalls. I hope that something good comes out of releasing DJBware into the public domain; it's a good gesture that hopefully will result in some good software. At the least, bringing it up-to-date. |
| pat Dec 20, 2007 8:28 PM EDT |
First, I'm not mocking anybody, I just found it ironic that he is going to push out his own version, instead of working with the existing djbdns community, and he had to apologize to do it. He didn't even bother to check if Dan had explicitly made djbdns public domain. To me that doesn't give me much confidence. I guess hard coding and updating is alright on toy systems, but in the real world, having to update production servers with new software is not as easy as "apt-get update". The more time one has to spend testing new versions of software to make sure the programmers didn't break anything the less time one has to do other more worth while things. You do test before you upgrade? Yes, DJB is not infallible, but, I don't think he ever said he was. I tend to look for facts, not gossip. Maybe being a non-coder gives one a certain limited perspective about how things work, so, I just don't know what to say anymore to comments like yours about code when I know that it is complete BS. |
| tuxchick Dec 21, 2007 10:12 AM EDT |
Well Pat, I can see that your reading comprehension is turned to "off", so I'm out of here. I will say this- you are a perfect representation of the element of the DJB community that has succeeded in chasing so many people away. |
| pat Dec 21, 2007 10:53 AM EDT |
DLTDHUOTAOTWO. |
| Scott_Ruecker Dec 21, 2007 10:58 AM EDT |
What's pat saying? |
| hkwint Dec 21, 2007 11:29 AM EDT |
Even Google doesn't know. |
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