Fedora and RedHat's autism toward personal users

[Mike A. Harris]

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Gordon Messmer wrote:

>>>Qmail's license precludes its being distributed as part of Fedora.  As
>>>an alternative, I would suggest Courier-MTA:  http://www.courier-mta.org/
>> 
>> http://cr.yp.to/distributors.html
>
>I'm well aware of qmail's license.  It's been discussed here on a number 
>of occasions past.  Specifically, that page notes:
>
>You may distribute a precompiled package if installing your package 
>produces exactly the same files, in exactly the same locations, that a 
>user would obtain by installing one of my packages listed
>
>That alone is enough to prevent distribution.  A distributor can not 
>ship bug fixes in a binary form.  You can debate it all you want, but I 
>suggest that you look at the previous debates instead.
>
>I know of a number of people who still use qmail, and are very fond of 
>it.  That's very well and good, but the license is going to keep qmail 
>in the hands of the people who want to build it for themselves, and out 
>of distributions that care about Free Software.

While I personally believe it is unlikely that we'd be adding a 
new MTA to the Fedora Core itself anytime soon, alternative MTAs 
without legal or licensing issues sound perfect for 'Fedora 
Alternatives' in the long term, and maintained outside Red Hat.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat