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0 pointsroryirvine7d ago0 comments

Dan Bernstein took that attitude back in the 90s - I think his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain", which ran counter to the mainstream position of "if it doesn't have a license, then you have to treat it as proprietary".

And, sure, djb wasn't actually likely to sue you if you went ahead and distributed modified versions of his software... but no-one else was willing to take that risk, and it ended up killing qmail, djbdns, etc stone dead. His work ended up going to waste as a result.

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chuckadams7d ago

I doubt the lack of license was the reason DJB's projects didn't take over the world. Most of them required heavy forking to break away from hardwired assumptions about the filesystem and play nice with the OS distribution, and DJB is himself notoriously difficult to work with. Still, qmail managed to establish maildir as the standard format and kill off mbox, and for that alone I'm eternally grateful.

roryirvineOP7d ago

Well, there were always plenty of patches available - it's just that lots of them conflicted with each other, and that was a product of the licensing.

Agreed with the rest, though. I relied heavily on qmail for about a decade, and learned a lot from the experience, even if it was a little terrifying on occasion!

chuckadams7d ago

These days one would just most likely create a fork on github. Vim was also maintained through separate patches for a long time, but Bram was a lot more accepting about integrating and distributing those patches himself.

12_throw_away7d ago

> his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain"

I mean philosophically and morally, sure, one can take that position ... but copyright law does not work like that, at least not for anything published in the US after 1989 [1].

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf

DANmode7d ago

> mainstream position

Not everybody is dictated by corporate attorneys; I don’t think this is an accurate portrayal.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsroryirvine7d ago0 comments

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chuckadams7d ago

roryirvineOP7d ago

Well, there were always plenty of patches available - it's just that lots of them conflicted with each other, and that was a product of the licensing.

Agreed with the rest, though. I relied heavily on qmail for about a decade, and learned a lot from the experience, even if it was a little terrifying on occasion!

chuckadams7d ago

12_throw_away7d ago

> his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain"

I mean philosophically and morally, sure, one can take that position ... but copyright law does not work like that, at least not for anything published in the US after 1989 [1].

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf

DANmode7d ago

> mainstream position

Not everybody is dictated by corporate attorneys; I don’t think this is an accurate portrayal.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse