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.”