[hypermail] Re: license in archive/

From: Kent Landfield <kent_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 10:29:24 -0500 (CDT)
Message-Id: <200208051529.KAA05873_at_rkive.landfield.com>

# Kent,
#
# please take my apologies if my emails sounded harsh. It was unintentional.
# I might have been a bit too brief. Let me explain:

Apology accepted.

# My primary goals was to get the ffii archives working again
# after a harddisk crash which unfortunately lost some of the installation.
# Thus I would have had to customise msg2archive anyway.
# Doing this I've stumbled across the license problem and reported it briefly
# to bring it to attention. It looked like an oversight so I did not explain
# the licensing details because I think that hypermail developers like
# you will take care of it once the issue is raised.

Understandable.

# I guess that many distributions and sites did package and use archive/
# in mistake as they probably did not notice that the license actually
# forbits this.

No it does not. The header states...

/*
**  FILE:          msg2archive.c
**  AUTHOR:        Kent Landfield
**
**  ABSTRACT:      update archived mailbox and 
***                ship to appropriate hypermail to update a database.
**
** This software is Copyright (c) 1996 by Kent Landfield.
**
** Permission is hereby granted to copy, distribute or otherwise 
** use any part of this package as long as you do not try to make 
** money from it or pretend that you wrote it.  This copyright 
** notice must be maintained in any copy made.

*/

If you are using it on a commercial site to manage your commercial email traffic there is no problem. If a vendor is distributing this as part of a larger package and are not selling this by itself, then there is no problem and never has been. There are multiple cases where this has been done.

If you take this piece of software, and sell it directly as your own without including the copyright header in the documentation or source code then there is a problem. If you sell it as a standalone utility (yeah right :)) then there is a problem.

I don't see this as a major issue and will likely change it. I don't personally find GPL the best answer as it too is restictive in a different sense.

# I wrote the (partly) replacement to get the ffii archive working again
# it also allowed me to fix a couple of bugs and later integrate it
# with other python code. Note that the ffii is a non-profit
# organisation, we just prefer to defend our Freedom in supporting Free Software

:) Supporting free software by demanding everything be free is not always a very defensible position but I understand and agree with the base goal.

-- 
Kent Landfield                        Phone: 1-817-545-2502
Email: kent_at_landfield.com             http://www.landfield.com/
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Received on Mon 05 Aug 2002 05:30:13 PM GMT