BSD Today: Interview with Wietse Venema about his tcp_wrappers license

Jun 02, 2001, 02:04 (6 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Jeremy C. Reed)

Jeremy Reed of BSD Today took the time to interview Mr. Venema regarding the license for tcp_wrappers. Echoing the issues involved in the recent stir over IP Filter's change of license, Mr. Venema's widely-used software was also licensed slightly differently: there's no permission included to modify the software in question. That changed after discussions with Theo de Raadt, but the interview provides an interesting insight into why a developer might want to introduce restrictions.

Says Mr. Venema: "People trust my software because it has few vulnerabilities. That is the result of a lot of hard work. In the case of tcpd, code by other people must be attributed to those people, so that their bugs are not attributed to me."

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• IPFilter Comes Out of OpenBSD CVS(May 30, 2001)
• SecurityPortal: IPFilter: Free No More?(May 28, 2001)