[SunRescue] djbdns, BIND, and DNS Security

[Joshua D. Boyd]

I saw his complaint about not being considered Open Source by Red Hat.  I
suppose that technically he is "Open Source", but he certainly isn't Free,
which might be what Red Hat is really concerned about.

I mean, while I would use this guy's software, because somedays I'm more
practical than idealist, I wouldn't want to invest times in making changes
(even bug fixes), if I can't fork the code if he is unhappy with my
changes.  

He doesn't say anything anywhere about whether we can or can't distribute
source changes, which is another major hole.

Further, the way the license is written really leaves you open for
problems.  What if the latest gcc requires a small change.  You make the
change, test the program and it look alright, but there is a small
difference that you didn't notice.  Well, now you are in violation on the
license, which is a really bad place to be.  If this guy registers his
copyrights (he doesn't say), then there is no practical limit to how much
he could hurt you or your business.

Last, it isn't very nice to call us hippocrites.  Until recently there was
no practical alternative to Netscape (it was either that or lynx, or
Mosaic, all really poor alternatives for most people).  That is why so
many distributions included it, even if it was hippocritical.  Red Hat
even admitted that is was a hypocritical stance that they were trying to
correct.  Just because you are inconsistent one area doesn't mean that you
should allow more inconsistancies to creap in.

I'm sorry, people with strang licences and who complain about them not
being accepted annoy me.  Frankly, I wish everything were confined to 6
licenses.  The GPL, LGPL, BSD, Artistic, Public Domain, or something that
is very clearly proprietary.  The MPL wouldn't be so bad, except that it's
wording make it so that other people have to make changes for their own
packages.  Which is to say, I don't object to the MPL, accept that it sets
a bad precident.  If it were written not to specifically talk about
Mozilla or Netscape (so that it could be reused verbatim), then I'd be
much happier about it.  If section 6.1 were rewritten and the rest of
section 6 chucked, I'd be perfectly happy.

--
Joshua Boyd

On Mon, 28 May 2001, Sebastian Marius Kirsch wrote:

> On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 02:55:44PM -0400, Loomis, Rip wrote:
> > Yeah, I looked for a license for djbdns as well and
> > couldn't find it at cr.yp.to or in the tarball.
> 
> djb doesn't license his software. See http://cr.yp.to/distributors.html.
> 
> -- 
> Yours, Sebastian Kirsch <skirsch at moebius.inka.de>
> 
> War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ketchup is a Vegetable.
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