Perhaps you’ve used his software before. Perhaps you know it’s a little “funky” in design, because DJB does things his way. But this is not to say that his software is faulty. Unfortunately, though, he is not known as one who updates his software to fix bugs or add new functionality to them.
I’ve been using Qmail for over a decade now. For most of this time, I’ve been using netqmail, which is the last release of Qmail that DJB did (1.03 I believe is the version number) with something ilke 25-35 patches on top of it. Some of those are trivial, such as the #include
I have come upon something else now that could use a little love. I use daemontools and ucspi-tcp to launch a number of my network services on my linux systems. I prefer this method as it’s a non-obtrusive and low resource method to make sure that if a service controlling daemon or other program crashes, that it gets relaunched automatically within 5 seconds.
Just the other day, a friend of mine from the FreeSWITCH community was complaining about troubles he has with NAT. I too hate NAT, especially when it comes to working with VoIP, and needed a little excuse to roll out ipv6 on my network. So I, taking a little break from writing C code and SQL stored procedures, decided to re-establish my ipv6 tunnel connection to Hurricane Electric. After working out the routing, radvd, and firewalling with ip6tables (which, I must say, is WAAAAY easier when you don’t have to muck around with NAT), I noticed that there is no ipv6 support in ucspi-tcp 0.88. I cannot say that I am surprised, given how long ago it was since 0.88 was initially released. And despite that DJB granted a less restrictive license (possibly it was straight to public domain? I don’t remember.), he still hosts the source and documentation on his website. It therefore seems that he still claims ownership over the source code in the sense that it was his effort that created them. Now a little Google searching reveals some patches out there for ucspi-tcp to add ipv6 support. But I prefer to get these patches from recognized sources, especially DJB himself. So this is a call out to DJB to ask that he incorporate this and other patches that people have provided over the years for this and his other software (where it makes sense that is). There are forks now of his software, but I am a little apprehensive about grabbing one of these forked projects instead of the DJB one.
Perhaps what I am asking here is unrealistic. Perhaps DJB gave the projects to the public domain because he has no intention to continue to support them. Perhaps I didn’t get that memo. I guess only he could tell us for sure.