License, unlicense, etc.

[schmonz]

notqmail's direct ancestor qmail is public-domain, but that may not be legally valid everywhere on the planet. I just encountered https://unlicense.org and wonder if that's what we might want for notqmail.

[leahneukirchen]

Another option is CC0. https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/

[janicez]

CCØ isn't really intended for software (though it works fine). The notqmail patches could be under an alternative-pleading licence of the MIT licence (or a similarly permissive free software licence) and the Unlicence public domain dedication - if the latter isn't valid in your country, then the former.

I personally tend to observe 2CBSD terms even with public domain software.

[janicez]

Importing qmail-qfilter may render this problem moot and require us to use the GPL.

[DerDakon]

I don't think GPL will happen. Not that I have any personal offense against GPL (I have my own software under GPL as well), but I don't see any relicensing to GPL happen.

[mbhangui]

I too use GPL so I want to ask what is wrong with GPL? Doesn't it allow you to share your code without restrictions? Doesn't it promote sharing of knowledge? This is something I haven't understood.

[DerDakon]

qmail is overly liberal in it's license, i.e. by being public domain it enforces nothing on the people who want to use it, e.g. closed source binary only distrubution without attribution.

[mbhangui]

oh ok. That's the kind of license I like and actually want. All these days I thought GPL allowed that with a safeguard to protect the code from someone else (other than the original author) making it proprietary.