Re: Bug#457318: ITP: qmail -- a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Julian Mehnle <julian@mehnle.net> writes:
> Kalle Kivimaa wrote:

>> in my opinion the new [qmail] license is DFSG-free.
>
> There ain't no new license.  DJB simply retracted his copyright.  As of 
> now, anyone can copy the qmail 1.03 code, make modifications at will, 
> claim copyright for those modifications, and distribute the whole under 
> any license they wish (or none at all, contributing their modifications 
> to the public domain as well).

There's a thereotical open question as to whether you can do that in
Europe (I think that was the jurisdiction with additional moral rights for
authors), but I think we can take a statement that the source is public
domain as a license to do all of those things even in jurisdictions where
releasing copyrighted work into the public domain isn't strictly possible.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>