[License-review] Process involved in adding the Sendmail license to the list of legacy licenses

[Dan Mahoney]

Hello there,

My day job is a sysadmin with ISC, but I also have a part-time maintainership (as Github: TheGushi) of the Trusted Domain Project’s software including OpenDMARC and OpenDKIM.

Several of these pieces of software are covered, at least in part, by the sendmail license and even if we decided to release any new work under a different license like the MPL, the sendmail license would still apply to a great deal of our code, as it was developed by Sendmail Inc.  (i.e. the sendmail license file would not go away).

In an interesting tom-sawyer quest, getting the license recognized by Github requires getting it included at ChooseALicence.com <http://choosealicence.com/>, which in turn requires it to show up on one of three sites (of which yours is one).  What would it take to make that happen?  It DOES have an SPDX entry.

This is an old license and while it’s not likely to be used for many new projects (it’s not “in vogue”, and it has bits in the license that apply specifically to the Sendmail corporation), there’s a great deal of sendmail in a number of open source operating systems, so things like Github *should* be aware of it, especially as Github becomes an archive location for legacy code that had previously lived elsewhere.

So my question here, before I go through the whole application process is: do I have enough “standing” as a maintainer of code previously licensed under this license to apply for it to be issued?  Or is that a non-starter?

I’m not interested in wasting anyone’s time, but couldn’t find an obvious contact method on the licensing page, without submitting a full application.  I apologize if this sidesteps the normal process.

Looking at your proliferation page (https://opensource.org/proliferation-report), I would guess that the sendmail license is considered “non-reusable” — but it’s certainly not retired in any sense.

I have also reached out to the FSF with similar questions.

Best (and happy new year)

-Dan Mahoney
ISC and Trusted Domain Project
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