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[Glenn Steen]

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On 10/10/05, Alex Neuman <alex at nkpanama.com> wrote:
> > DCC and Razor are no more free, razor hasn't been so for the past 2
> > years and dcc for about 4 months..
> >
> > Heres what you need to do:
> > Enable the DCC / RAZOR plugins in /etc/mail/spamassassin/v310.pre if you
> > qualify for their free usage policy OR comment out the erroneous lines
> > in spam.assassin.prefs.conf if you don't qualify.
>
> Anybody care to explain why/how DCC/Razor are not free? Are they "not free
> as in beer", "not free as in speech", or some other form of "not free"?
> Thanks...
>
Excerpts from their sites
DCC: (in reverse order of appearance, for clarity)
...
The Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse source carries a license that
is free to organizations that do not sell filtering devices or
services except to their own users and that participate in the global
DCC network. (I.e. ISPs that use the DCC to filter mail for their own
users are intended to be covered in the free license.) You also can't
call it your own or blame anyone for using it.
...
Note that it has never been proper to sell the bandwidth and, most
important, human system administration work of the public DCC servers
to third parties. Sellers of products or services including the DCC
must provide DCC servers of their own or contracted from others. For
example, Commtouch operates DCC servers for its licensees.
...
Razor2: (More or less the total sum of
http://razor.sourceforge.net/docs/doc.php?type=text&name=SERVICE_POLICY)
...
Cloudmark SpamNet Service Policy

V1.0
Aug 1, 2003

SpamNet Service and Razor-Agents

While Razor-Agents are distributed under the Artistic License and will
stay that way, the Cloudmark SpamNet service, a particular implementation
of a Razor-compliant back-end, is a commercial operation with maintenance
and support costs, and is no longer available for unlimited free use,
effective immediately.

Use of the SpamNet service by Razor-agent-enabled software will remain
free for personal use, subject to capacity constraints that Cloudmark may
enforce against intensive users of the service as it sees fit.

Distribution or use of the system in commercial embedded software
solutions is not free. All such access must be licensed by Cloudmark.
Organizations interested in working with Razor or with Cloudmark's
next-generation SpamNet client technologies should contact Cloudmark at
partners at cloudmark.com
...

Just for completeness, lets add this blurb from the Pyzor website too:
...
 Pyzor is a collaborative, networked system to detect and block spam
using identifying digests of messages.

Pyzor initially started out to be merely a Python implementation of
Razor, but due to the protocol and the fact that Razor's server is not
Open Source or software libre, I decided to impelement Pyzor with a
new protocol and release the entire system as Open Source and software
libre.

Since the entire system is released under the GPL, people are free to
host their own independent servers. Server peering is planned for a
future release.
...

So of them, we have one GPL (but suffering from .... other problems...
Well, really just the scarcity of servers:-), one "free for YOUR
users, provided you SHARE", and one "free for personal use, but not
much else".

This is enough "freedom" that I, for one, can use them. And it is
strongly suggested that all you who provide commercial anti-spam
services should be using the commercial offering for Razor and
participate with at least a server and/or a commercial license for
DCC, AFAICS.

--
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se

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