[License-review] Sendmail License -- Legacy Approval Submission

[Dan Mahoney]

Hello,

INTRODUCTION AND META:

I'm Dan Mahoney.  My "day job" is a systems admin with ISC (bind, ISC DHCP, Kea, F-Root DNS server), but I am also a maintainer, patch wrangler, and build engineer for several projects orignally authored by Sendmail Inc, and now entrusted to the Trusted Domain Project, referenced below.  

Note that I've asked my email client to make this a "plain text" email, but it still seems to want to auto-format links and "markdownish" text.

I am submitting the long-standing and venerable Sendmail License for approval as a legacy submission.  It predates the dot-com boom (the first one!) by a long shot.  It includes by references, words offering original copyright to the Regents of the University of California, (AKA UC Berkeley), where Eric Allman worked as a student and a staffer in the 1980's when he originally wrote sendmail.

PROLIFERATION CATEGORY: 

Non-reusable licenses -- Because it mentions Sendmail, inc by name, which is a superseded corporation.

Although older versions of sendmail (and its libraries) can still be included with other products, and this license may apply, I don't think that's what the reusability argument means in this case.  A new company could not write brand-new code unrelated-to-sendmail-or-milters code and choose to apply this license.

Even future releases of Open Source sendmail will bear the name "Sentrion" rather than Sendmail Inc, and while it may be useful to have that newer license be present as well in your archive, there's much less software to which it applies.

There are still (infrequent) maintenance releases of sendmail, but the landscape of unix mail servers has become much more wide open, which means OSes may no longer choose to package a single "defacto" one.  (By asking this older license to be included, I make no assertions about the worthiness or unworthiness of the newer one for inclusion).

Confusingly, the newer license still calls itself "The Sendmail License", both because of history, and it continues to make sense because sendmail is the software, not the company -- this would be like saying "BIND license" instead of  "ISC license".  (Which ISC does not).

RATIONALE:

For more than three decades, software originally authored by Eric Allman known simply as "sendmail" has been included with operating software distributions both open source and closed source, including HP-UX, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, IBM AIX and many others too numerous to list here.  In the 20th century, if you used a unix or unix-like system (open or closed source) and it sent mail, this was the piece of software you got with it.  Later, a commercial entity (Sendmail, Inc.) became the commercial steward of this software and released both a commercial, closed-source product as well as continuing to produce open-source sendmail with appropriate bugfixes and modernizations such as SSL support, SMTP Authorization, filtering plugins ("milters") using an eventually-open API, and the like.

Note (again) that software *currently* released under the Sendmail Name, such as Sendmail 8.17 (released in 2022), bears copyrights to Sentrion, who bought the sendmail trademarks, the license I am seeking to include is the older Sendmail license from when the sponsoring body was simply called Sendmail Inc.  This earlier license, rather than the more recent, is also the license that will show up in many, many other open source projects, including:

1) Full operating systems that included sendmail throughout their lives.

-and-

2) Things like mail filters that did not include the full sendmail server but included a bundled copy of Sendmail's "libmilter" API, to which the copyright applied.

Both the above categories will inevitably wind up put in code archives or committed to Github for historical purposes, and it's useful for them to be auto-recognized the same way.

Additionally (and relevant to my request), there is a third category: 

3) Several other pieces of software originally authored by Sendmail Inc. as reference implementations that now reflect current internet standards such as OpenDMARC, OpenDKIM, OpenARC, and so these works were distributed with and under the original sendmail license.

These projects have been handed over to other organizations, including the Trusted Domain Project.  While some portions of our code can be released under other licenses such as the Mozilla Public License, the sendmail license must still apply.

For example: 

https://github.com/trusteddomainproject/OpenARC
https://github.com/trusteddomainproject/OpenDKIM
https://github.com/trusteddomainproject/OpenDMARC

META-RATIONALE:

(Or: why this is relevant to me, and what my stake is)

As mentioned in the introduction, I am actively working on the above three "spun out" projects.

As mentioned previously on the license-request list, inclusion on one of three lists is required in order for Github to acknowledge that a license is "known" -- because the tool they use depends on curation by choosealicense.com <http://choosealicense.com/>, which in turn requires that the license be listed by opensource.org <http://opensource.org/>, Gnu's list of licenses, or Open Definition's list of open licenses (this third one does not apply to non-code projects).

I don't know that I like this dependency chain, but it is "what is".

See their requirements here:

https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/blob/gh-pages/CONTRIBUTING.md#adding-a-license

And my comments about this specific license here

https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/1067

Upon searching github for files covered by this license, over 2000 files were found:

https://github.com/search?q=Sendmail+filename%3ALICENSE&type=Code

SPDX.org lists these as two different licenses, called "Sendmail" (which mentions Sendmail inc) and "Sendmail8-23" (which mentions Sentrion)

https://spdx.org/licenses/Sendmail.html
Sendmail License 8.23 <https://spdx.org/licenses/Sendmail-8.23.html>

TEXT OF LICENSE (copied from first entry a few lines above):

SENDMAIL LICENSE
The following license terms and conditions apply, unless a redistribution agreement or other license is obtained from Sendmail, Inc., 6475 Christie Ave, Third Floor, Emeryville, CA 94608, USA, or by electronic mail at license at sendmail.com.
License Terms:
Use, Modification and Redistribution (including distribution of any modified or derived work) in source and binary forms is permitted only if each of the following conditions is met:
    • 1. Redistributions qualify as "freeware" or "Open Source Software" under one of the following terms:
    • (a) Redistributions are made at no charge beyond the reasonable cost of materials and delivery.
    • (b) Redistributions are accompanied by a copy of the Source Code or by an irrevocable offer to provide a copy of the Source Code for up to three years at the cost of materials and delivery. Such redistributions must allow further use, modification, and redistribution of the Source Code under substantially the same terms as this license. For the purposes of redistribution "Source Code" means the complete compilable and linkable source code of sendmail including all modifications.
    • 2. Redistributions of Source Code must retain the copyright notices as they appear in each Source Code file, these license terms, and the disclaimer/limitation of liability set forth as paragraph 6 below.
    • 3. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the Copyright Notice, these license terms, and the disclaimer/limitation of liability set forth as paragraph 6 below, in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. For the purposes of binary distribution the "Copyright Notice" refers to the following language: 
"Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Sendmail, Inc. All rights reserved."
    • 4. Neither the name of Sendmail, Inc. nor the University of California nor names of their contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. The name "sendmail" is a trademark of Sendmail, Inc.
    • 5. All redistributions must comply with the conditions imposed by the University of California on certain embedded code, which copyright Notice and conditions for redistribution are as follows:
    • (a) Copyright (c) 1988, 1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
    • (b) Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
    • (i) Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
    • (ii) Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
    • (iii) Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
    • 6. Disclaimer/Limitation of Liability: THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY SENDMAIL, INC. AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL SENDMAIL, INC., THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
$Revision: 8.16 $, Last updated $Date: 2010/10/25 23:11:19 

CLOSING:

I thank you for your time and consideration

My use of the words "unix" and "unix-like" are used without the permission or awareness of the current trademark-holder and are simply there as general terms of reference.

-Dan Mahoney