[Mailman-Developers] mailman / archive-ui / licensing questions

[David Jeske]

Thanks for the super-detailed replies... I'm separating these discussions,
so here I have some questions about licensing and bundling..

> So in some sense, CSLA needn't become *the* Mailman archiver, but it should
> definitely be *a* Mailman archiver.  Then you can make all the engineering
> and
> design decisions you prefer, but with the confidence that it will Just Work
> with Mailman 3.


Sure but this isn't why I'm here. CSLA is already *a* mailman archiver..I
think we first released it in 2004. A few of us ex-egroups folks hacked it
out because we used it for private projects. We open-sourced it so we could
use it across organizational boundaries and because we were happy to give
it away to anyone who wanted it. We're just all primarily focused on
startup and commercial endeavors, so we havn't done much to package and
popularize it.

Right now I'm in between entrepreneural endeavors and spending some time
'giving back' and coding/donating-to/helping several open-source projects.
As I engage with these projects, all of them are using Mailman, which is
fantastic. However, nearly all of them are also using pipermail, which is
not so great. They are using it because it's the default, so it was easy.

I started to talk to one of them about installing CSLA (or MHonArc, or
anything really), and realized I should see if you folks are interested in
a great bundled archiver, to fix the problem at the source. I'm not
particularly interested in promoting or maintaining an open-source project
around this, so if you folks don't want a shiny new (S-BSD licensed)
archiver to bundle, I'll probably just fix a few things, bump the CSLA
archiver to 0.3 and move on.

---

I admit that even with a pretty good knowledge of these many licenses, I'm
not familiar with the intracacies of FSF copyright assignment and non-GPL
free licenses.

The ClearsilverArchiver code (written by me and two others) is released
under the "Simplified BSD" license and "totally free". It's important to me
that any code I release be similarly free-and-unrestricted
(i.e. BSD/Python/Artistic/PublicDomain), not free under certain conditions
(i.e. GPL/LGPL). It's not possible to assert GPL restrictions on
totally-free code, because it's already totally free.

FSF says S-BSD is GPL-Compatible, which I believe means they are saying
they have no problem with GPL code depending on and being combined with
(i.e. linked with) S-BSD code, because the S-BSD code is fully open-source
and does not put restrictions on the use of the GPL code.

It's also my understanding that the primary reason for FSF copyright
assignment is to provide a coherent entity to enforce the terms of the GPL
by challenging violators who don't redistribute source.... something which
is not necessary for S-BSD. (Though I suppose they could enforce that folks
include the S-BSD copyright notices.)

So I guess this all drives to the following question:

Is Mailman-team is interested in having a better built-in archiver that is
included in the distribution, but licensed under the less-restrictive S-BSD
terms?

Sorry for the length. This license stuff can be complicated.


-- 

On a weirdly unrelated coincidence, thanks for smtpd.py. I just hacked it
into smtp-to-maildir for a "private hosted webmail" installation. We were
migrating code/data to some new machines and smtpd.py seemed simpler than
fighting with qmail-installation or configuring postfix to "accept
everything" (something it doesn't seem designed to do).

> But that absolutely shouldn't stop any other third party archiver from
being

> Mailman 3 compatible.
>
> As I said, like the Python standard library, it's both a blessing and a
> curse. :)
>
> >As for the features it doesn't have from your list: Editing would be easy
> >to add because it's sqlite (deciding on the auth system is probably more
of
> >an issue than the editing). Anti-Crawl code is really an issue of
> >configuration for cheap in-memory state-management. NNTP is well. that
> >would be a big job that I doubt will be bitten off by something as
"small"
> >as a list archiver.
>
> Why can't we kill off Gmane while we're killing off Gmail, and *Groups?
:).
>
> >What is the REST UI used by? CSLA supports RSS. When it comes to a more
> >involved REST UI, what software would be hitting it? I don't think I'll
> >understand your other API/REST points until I see an answer to this.
>
> I'm a list owner and someone requests that a post containing private
> information be taken down.
>
> As a drive-by archive user, I want to request that a message get sent to
me so
> that I can reply to it in my mail reader as if I had received the
original.
>
> I run a question/answer forum that gateways a list, and I want to +1
really
> helpful messages, or give some extra kudos to really helpful users.
>
> -Barry
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