license submission: qmail

[Brian Behlendorf]

ESR and I exchanged some private email on the subject of Darren Reed's
"clarification" of his terms on the ipfilter code to deny the distribution
of modified derived works; he pointed out that clause 4 of the OSD states:

   4. The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in
   modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch
   files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at
   build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software
   built from modified source code. The license may require derived works
   to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

I think this is a flaw in the OSD - what it means is that those authors
who place their software under such a license effective make forking
impossible.  Why?  Because a project aimed at building a derivative work
may not have a shared code tree, making collaboration impractical enough
to effectively prevent a fork.  This allows for pragmatic window-dressing
and bug fixing by repackagers like Debian and other linux distributions,
but it does not really provide for the same checks on power between
developers that are really what open source is all about.

By this token, I hereby submit that qmail's license terms, at least as
defined at http://cr.yp.to/qmail/dist.html, passes this clause, and the
others in the OSD, based on one theory - that the requirement

  only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the
  source code

is superfluous.  Such a promise never needs to be made, because a
potential redistributor *always* has the right to create and distribute
patches (was it the Accolade case that established that?), and "with" is
not well defined and could simply mean on the same CD or from the same
website, though that's largely immaterial: I have the right to distribute
patches to qmail - I even have the right to create a single tarball that
includes the qmail tarball and my patchset.  These are standard rights
under copyright law - it's clearly a "compilation", and not a derived
work.

The other terms of clause #4 are met by DJB's requirements on package
builders that he states on that same page.  The other clauses in the OSD
are also not violated.  Clause #3 would be in question, but #4 seems to
allow exceptions to #3 - which seems to fly in the face of the rationale
of #3: "people need to be able to experiment with and redistribute
modifications".

Thus, I submit that either qmail's license be approved as an
OSD-conformant license, or OSI consider whether clause #4 needs, er,
"clarification".  It's hard to argue that neither is the case.

	Brian