roryirvine

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Principal infrastructure/platform engineer at a boutique tech consultancy. Started as a sysadmin at an ISP, moved into managed hosting, then a major Silicon Valley tech company, and a couple of startups.

Originally from Northern Ireland, but have lived in London for long enough to consider it home.

Interested in infrastructure and complex systems of any sort - transport, energy, international trade, ecosystems, zoology. I'm generally optimistic about tech and its place in our society, but believe that better consumer-/user-/safety-focussed regulation is necessary. My politics might best be described as 'bright green'.
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Show threadroryirvineMar 19

Well, there were always plenty of patches available - it's just that lots of them conflicted with each other, and that was a product of the licensing.

Agreed with the rest, though. I relied heavily on qmail for about a decade, and learned a lot from the experience, even if it was a little terrifying on occasion!

Show threadroryirvineMar 19

Dan Bernstein took that attitude back in the 90s - I think his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain", which ran counter to the mainstream position of "if it doesn't have a license, then you have to treat it as proprietary".

And, sure, djb wasn't actually likely to sue you if you went ahead and distributed modified versions of his software... but no-one else was willing to take that risk, and it ended up killing qmail, djbdns, etc stone dead. His work ended up going to waste as a result.