Re: Is this a free license?

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Thomas Bushnell, BSG <tb@becket.net> writes:

> Qmail says "you may not copy this if you do X, Y, or Z with it".

I must be missing something obvious, since I don't see anything on:

    <http://cr.yp.to/qmail/dist.html>

that says that.  Quite to the contrary, it explicitly states:

| You may distribute copies of qmail-1.03.tar.gz, with MD5 checksum
| 622f65f982e380dbe86e6574f3abcb7c.

There are no conditions placed on that grant of permission.

The remainder of the page discusses the requirements for distribution of
modified versions.  Distributing the tarball, patches, and a script to
compile them is not distribution of a modified version.

On <http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html>, Dan states explicitly:

| Note that, since it's not copyright infringement for you to apply a
| patch, it's also not copyright infringement for someone to give you a
| patch.

So Dan certainly appears to believe that one can distribute the qmail
source code along with a patch to that code and a script to compile it,
based on his statements on his web pages.  That puts me back to trying to
understand why I should believe one of you over the other.

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