Mailing List Archive: patches and copyrights

patches and copyrights

Feb 23, 1997, 12:30 PM

Post #1 of 6 (1860 views)

> As I understand the licensing of qmail I can't send anyone diffs

In 1974, Congress organized a commission that spent four years studying
software copyrights.

In 1980, Congress passed the commission's recommendations almost
verbatim, providing several fundamental rights to software users.

In 1997, most software users have no idea that they have these rights.

This is depressing.

See http://pobox.com/~djb/softwarelaw.html.

---Dan
Let your users manage their own mailing lists. http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html

Re: patches and copyrights [ In reply to ]

brian at hyperreal

Feb 23, 1997, 3:50 PM

Post #2 of 6 (1856 views)

On 23 Feb 1997, D. J. Bernstein wrote:
> > As I understand the licensing of qmail I can't send anyone diffs
>
> In 1974, Congress organized a commission that spent four years studying
> software copyrights.
>
> In 1980, Congress passed the commission's recommendations almost
> verbatim, providing several fundamental rights to software users.
>
> In 1997, most software users have no idea that they have these rights.
>
> This is depressing.
>
> See http://pobox.com/~djb/softwarelaw.html.

Oops! Check out the "Location:":

taz [19] telnet pobox.com 80
Trying 208.210.124.25...
Connected to pobox.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /~djb/ HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 22:44:38 GMT
Server: Apache/0.8.13
Location: http://ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/
Content-type: text/html

<HEAD><TITLE>Document moved</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY><H1>Document moved</H1>
The document has moved <A
HREF="http://ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/">here</A>.<P>
</BODY>

Getting to the software law page manually, it's a very good read. Does
this, combined with your qmail license, mean that if someone wishes to
distribute "Qmail++" as a variant package, and they wanted to make
installation and configuration as easy as possible, they could distribute
1.00 unmodified and a shell script which automatically applied the
"++"-specific patches, and compiled and installed the program? At what
point is distributing 1.00 + a set of patches not an "unmodified"
distribution?

Brian

--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--
brian@hyperreal.com http://www.apache.org http://www.organic.com/jobs

Re: patches and copyrights [ In reply to ]

david at summersoft

Feb 23, 1997, 7:25 PM

Post #3 of 6 (1854 views)

On 24 Feb 1997, D. J. Bernstein wrote:

> Date: 24 Feb 1997 02:30:47 -0000
> From: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@koobera.math.uic.edu>
> To: djb-qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu
> Subject: Re: patches and copyrights
>
> > Location: http://ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/
>
> Grrr. Unfortunately there don't seem to be humans at pobox on Sundays.
>
> > they could distribute
> > 1.00 unmodified and a shell script which automatically applied the
> > "++"-specific patches, and compiled and installed the program?
>
> Right. Once the user owns a copy of qmail-1.00.tar.gz, Congress lets him
> modify it without checking with me.
>
> ---Dan
> Let your users manage their own mailing lists. http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html
>

Sounds like a perfect reason to use SRPMS in Linux Redhat.....

David Wayne Summers "Linux: The choice of a GNU generation."
david@summersoft.fay.ar.us PGP Public Key available on request.
PGP Key fingerprint = C0 E0 4F 50 DD A9 B6 2B 60 A1 31 7E D2 28 6D A8

Re: patches and copyrights [ In reply to ]

Feb 23, 1997, 7:30 PM

Post #4 of 6 (1850 views)

> Location: http://ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/

Grrr. Unfortunately there don't seem to be humans at pobox on Sundays.

> they could distribute
> 1.00 unmodified and a shell script which automatically applied the
> "++"-specific patches, and compiled and installed the program?

Right. Once the user owns a copy of qmail-1.00.tar.gz, Congress lets him
modify it without checking with me.

---Dan
Let your users manage their own mailing lists. http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html

Re: patches and copyrights [ In reply to ]

J.Hayward at utexas

Feb 23, 1997, 10:50 PM

Post #5 of 6 (1856 views)

D. J. Bernstein writes:

In 1997, most software users have no idea that they have these rights.
This is depressing.

well, I'm not aware of any court which has explicitly ruled on the
context diff issue but if it's OK with you that's good enough for me.

--
Jeff

Re: patches and copyrights [ In reply to ]

Feb 24, 1997, 12:56 PM

Post #6 of 6 (1842 views)

On 24 Feb 1997, D. J. Bernstein wrote:

> Date: 24 Feb 1997 02:30:47 -0000
> From: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@koobera.math.uic.edu>
> To: djb-qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu
> Subject: Re: patches and copyrights
>
> > Location: http://ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/
>
> Grrr. Unfortunately there don't seem to be humans at pobox on Sundays.
>
> > they could distribute
> > 1.00 unmodified and a shell script which automatically applied the
> > "++"-specific patches, and compiled and installed the program?
>
> Right. Once the user owns a copy of qmail-1.00.tar.gz, Congress lets him
> modify it without checking with me.
>
> ---Dan
> Let your users manage their own mailing lists. http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html
>

Sounds like a perfect reason to use SRPMS in Linux Redhat.....

This is exactly what I wanted to know: is it permitted to make src.rpm
for qmail?

Mate