Dave Sherohman <esper at sherohman.org> writes: > On Wed, Apr 25, 2001 at 09:48:30PM -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > > Dave Sherohman <esper at sherohman.org> writes: > > > You're not allowed to distribute modified binaries of qmail. If you make a > > > change, it won't be available to anyone else unless either that someone else > > > is willing to compile from source or DJB makes it part of the official > > > version. Forking is right out. > > > > And some people say this is a *bad* thing. Sheesh. > > Depends on what you mean by "bad". > > DJB's not wrong to choose that restriction. IMO, he has every right > to dictate how his code may be used and this is not an unreasonable > restriction. RMS may have ethical problems with it, but I don't. > > However, from a practical standpoint, I think it's a bad choice. As a > developer, I'm less likely to burn my time working on a project that > I can't fork if the maintainer is completely unreasonable[1] or for > some reason stops maintaining the project. Any decision which causes > developers to turn away reduces the value of the open source process. > If many eyeballs make all bugs shallow, then fewer eyeballs will leave > places for bugs to hide. The great weakness of open source is the lack of firm central control; you tend to descend into glitz and feeping creaturism. Which is exactly what DJB wishes to avoid, and does avoid. As a sysadmin, I value the performance and security of his code. And it's not clear to me that more eyeballs have actually paid any attention to the source code of many open source projects. The number of people who've read qmail well enough to propose or release patches is quite high. Then there's the even greater imponderable of the relative value of various eyeballs. > [1] Although I've never dealt with him and have no opinion of my own > on the topic, many people seem to think that DJB is already unreasonable > by default. In online interactions he seems abrupt and uncompromising. And not much interested in justifying his decisions, either, beyond the first exchange or two. -- David Dyer-Bennet / Welcome to the future! / dd-b at dd-b.net SF: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ Minicon: http://www.mnstf.org/minicon/ Photos: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/