Lets say you use the software in your job, say you work for an ISP. Imagine coming up with a great product, like that SPAM filtering technology someone gave a talk on at a recent Linux meeting. Now say you have to hack on Dan's pristine code to add hooks in it to perform some filtering. You want to send this code to clients that want to pay you money for it. So you give Dan a call, hey Dan, can I ship this? Dan says "No, thats the wrong solution". So you make and distribute a source patch. People use it, maybe Dan doesn't like it, maybe he gets upset and takes you to court, maybe he wants to post snippets of your email on his web site to prove to the world that you are an idiot. Thats just a big "what if". Probably wouldn't happen, but you never know. On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 01:10:37AM -0500, David Phillips wrote: > Karl Bongers writes: > > That sounds to me like he is prohibiting you from producing > > modifications. Which could put you at a disadvantage if you > > build a system around it. > > Like what? If you have a legitimate need for a modification, such as the > QMAILQUEUE patch, then you could ask him for an exception. He doesn't want > people distributing modified versions for compatibility and reliability > reasons. When vendors can install things wherever they want, it makes > things difficult for users and people trying to help them. Vendors could > also break things and give the software a bad name. > > You could always go the FreeBSD ports route. The qmail port installs at > least one patch automatically when building. This is perfectly legal, since > the patching is done by the end user. No modified binaries are being > distributed. > > The end result here is good: If you install qmail according to the install > instructions or "Life with qmail", it will work. If you need help with > something, you can be given very specific instructions that will work. The > same does not hold true for most other software. > > -- > David Phillips <david at acz.org> > http://david.acz.org/ > > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list