Adding the Sendmail license

[thegushi]

Hello there. I help maintain OpenDKIM and OpenDMARC. These use the Sendmail license, partially because much of their code was developed at Sendmail Inc by Sendmail employees. There are subsequent licenses that some of our code is covered by, but at least a large portion of the code will still be covered by the sendmail license as well.

Additionally, Sendmail and other sendmail-originated things like libmilter exists inside several other open source projects (many of the BSD's for example), and the LICENSE.sendmail file appears alongside that code. Doing a code search as per your site showed about 2000 hits.

This is an old license. It's well proliferated. Nobody is licensing NEW software with it anymore, but having GitHub show "Unknown license" for this feels broken.

None of opendefinition.org, gnu, or opensource.org list this license, but this feels like simple oversight.

Also, as I am not a sendmail employee, I don't even know that I can apply for the license to be approved by these bodies.

What's the best way to proceed here?

[mlinksva]

I'm mildly surprised the Sendmail license isn't noted on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html possibly email the contact listed there.

OSI does have a legacy license category, see https://opensource.org/approval for the process. I think https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2021-September/005216.html is the most recent legacy approval.

It's probably worth being clear about which of Sendmail or Sendmail-8.23 licenses or both (as cataloged by SPDX) or some other version(s) you want reviewed -- and if other versions (or there's anything wrong with the SPDX versions) it'd best to get them added or fixed in https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML

[thegushi]

I've reached out to OSI and FSF, let's see where that goes.

[thegushi]

FSF: Ticket number [gnu.org #1906727]

No autoresponse from OSI as of yet.

[thegushi]

I've applied to OSI to get the sendmail license (the non-8.23 version) included. The 8.23 version differs in that it references Sentrion versus sendmail inc (aka sendmail.com vs .org) -- and most of the code that's been sucked into other projects from code originally released by sendmail used the version when it was Sendmail Inc. Relevant to my purposes is that opendkim/marc/arc were released by sendmail inc.