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Adding the Sendmail license #1067
Description
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?
Activity
mlinksva commentedon Dec 31, 2022
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 commentedon Dec 31, 2022
I've reached out to OSI and FSF, let's see where that goes.
thegushi commentedon Jan 6, 2023
FSF: Ticket number [gnu.org #1906727]
No autoresponse from OSI as of yet.
thegushi commentedon Jan 17, 2023
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.
thegushi commentedon May 5, 2025
After talking with somebody else on the project, I think we're probably going to wind up relicensing to BSD or MPL. The send mail license has changed too much overtime such that there's not one canonical copy, because of copyright dates that are embedded into the license.
Tarekchehahde commentedon Jul 11, 2026
Opened #1361 — adds hidden Sendmail page (SPDX text) with OpenDKIM/OpenDMARC/OpenARC LICENSE.Sendmail examples. Note: Sendmail is not on OSI/FSF/OD lists; flagging for maintainer review against CONTRIBUTING approval criteria.
thegushi commentedon Jul 11, 2026
Hey there, thanks for this.
For what it's worth, the original reason for wanting this was that Coverity Scan and Github offered some features only to "approved open source projects under an existing license". So to try and get access to that, I had to chase this.
Github itself also doesn't seem to know how to reference that a project has a given license if it doesn't show in one of the above lists. (They seem to have outsourced it to ChooseALicense rather than reinventing the wheel).
Of course, Coverity Scan seems to be going away, now that LLMs are doing similar work, so for that purpose at least, it's kind of moot.
As I had said, nobody is going to choose to apply the Sendmail license to their own work today, we're just in a unique place in the world. (I'll also note that my dayjob is with ISC, and we too have our own license, even though current versions of BIND are under the MPL).
It's still worth getting this listed here, just from a "completionist" point of view, if you're that kind of nerd. I know I am.