Qmail Support Forum

admin · Site Admin Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 209

We've had the qmail discussion before.

qmail hasn't been worked on by the author since 1999.

Lots of people create lots of patches. Not all compatible with each other.

The qmail license doesn't allow qmail to be patched, compiled, and distributed. Or even for the source code to be patched and distributed for a local compile.

Each server must have the source code and all the patches installed, and the patches run against the source, before it's compiled.

It's secure. It's fast. And it's a nightmare to get it to do what you want if what you want didn't exist in 1999.

admin · Site Admin Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 209

And I've been actually using it, installing it for many clients, building a support team around it, developing plugins and subsystems for it (including the exim.conf file DA uses and the SpamBlocker Plugin for managing blocklist use). For not the last 30 days, but for over 30 months.

I started using DA after two years of frustration with Plesk, trying to make fundamental setting changes to qmail so it would be RFC-compliant (in other words a good interplayer on the 'net), work with multiple blocklists, allow those blocklists to be chosen on a per-domain basis, etc. I downloaded and read Life with qmail and bought and read Dave Sill's excellent qmail book. I was getting nowhere; it would take almost a complete rewrite.

Which is impossible because qmail is copyrighted by Dan Bernstein, it's NOT free software, you have no license to modify it except under the terms quoted on his website (which is currently down and which has no publicly available whois record (again not RFC-compliant) and there appears no other way to contact him.

I'm going from memory, here, but Dan Bernstein's "permission to distribute" (it's most certainly not a license though I may have called it that in the past) says you can make any changes you want for your own use but you cannot redistribute them as part of qmail; you must distribute them separately.

And as a result, there are an uncountable amount of patches for qmail to do just about everything you can think of (except be RFC compliant) but not all of them work together. And once you find the ones that do, you cannot distribute qmail to your clients already patched and ready for use.

And Bernstein also says (on his website) that he owns all the rights to qmail and he can take them away from you at any time.

And all those uncounted patches? What licenses, if any, are they distributed under? What owners are waiting in the wings to exact their toll on you based on their own distribution policies, copyrights and/or licenses or lack thereof? How can you or anyone else assure compliance with all of those?

So let's move on...
quote:
Please don't tell me that if sw-soft could build a system based on qmail and DA team cannot

I cannot speak for JBMC (the company that produces DirectAdmin), but as for myself, I can certainly tell you.

I was a Plesk Gold Partner before I decided to get involved with DirectAdmin.

SWsoft obtained a heavily patched copy of qmail when they purchased Plesk (the company).

Plesk distributed, and SWsoft continues to patch and distribute, this patched copy of qmail, in an RPM. Perhaps they have a separate agreement with Dan Bernstein; since he's the author and controls all rights, there's nothing to say they don't have one. There's no requirement that such an agreement be public.

But JBMC has no such agreement.

While I have no connection with JBMC except that I purchase and use their software and volunteer to be an administrator on this forum, I can speak for myself and say I believe it would be very dangerous for JBMC, absent of such an agreement, to do anything except start at the beginning with a copy of qmail, and put together the patches they thought might work together, get distribution rights for all those patches, write their own patches where suitable other patches weren't available, and then distribute the original qmail source code and their own patches separately, and write a patch and compilation routine to be run on each server, to make it work.

And then hope that Bernstein doesn't take away the permission he's implicitly given them since he can.

Dan Bernstein is a brilliant man (read his wikipedia entry here), but in my opinion he's not of the opinion that working for a free, open and cooperative Internet based on published RFCs, is something he does.

For more information on RFCs, and their meaning on and to the Internet, read the wikipedia article here.
quote:
Anyway consider it like a recommendation,

I am. And that's why I'm strongly recommending against it.
quote:
maybe you want to start a poll for it.

I won't, though you certainly can.

In my opinion, for a commercial product to include qmail absent a license for continued distribution is dangerous and foolhardy.

But as I wrote above, that's my opinion. Your opinion is certainly welcome.

Jeff

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