[Techtalk] Majordomo Replacement?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 10:51:28AM -0700 or thereabouts, Kai MacTane wrote:
 
> > I remember how disenheartened I was when I found a bug in majordomo 
> > but, at the time, couldn't see anyone interested in having a report 
> > about it, or receiving the patch I wrote for it when I realized no 
> > one else was going to solve it.
> 
> Yeah, and the license terms won't even let me fork it and take it 
> over. I'd be happy to maintain it, and simultaneously build it into 
> a really kick-ass modern MLM, but the license doesn't allow for 
> redistribution. (Effectively, 'domo actually *is not* open-source.) 

I am fairly sure that SuSE once released a security advisory for
Majordomo which went, roughly, "There is a possible exploit in 
Majordomo when built in this way. We have a patch, but the licence 
prevents us from making it available (*). We therefore recommend 
you either do not use it or you trust your users until upstream
fix it."

Over on the majordomo development list, this caused something of
an explosion of emails.

Telsa

* I think the licence was one of those "if you modify it, you
can't continue to call it by the same package name" types. This
was very common at one time. Pine is the same sort of thing, I
believe.