On Nov 05, 2010, at 04:01 PM, Marc Egli wrote:
We are building a newsletter application for the django framework. For bounce detection we want to use the Mailman bouncerAPI because reimplementing would be a bad idea. Now my question is: can i release my application under a less restrictive license like the bsd license? I don't distribute Mailman i only list it as a requirement in setup.py
According to the gpl-faq this is a borderline case because i only invoke a function and wait for the response. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins
Is it possible to use Mailman like this? Is this the intended use of the BouncerAPI?
I'm not sure I fully understand - you want to use the bounce detection code that lives in Mailman 2's Bouncers package? Do you want to be able to pass a message object in, let all the heuristics run, and then get a list of matching addresses out of it?
That's a very interesting use case, and it would be useful to have that available as a separate package (perhaps something to do for MM3), but it's not how the Mailman2 code is intended to be used. You probably can use it that way if you set up your PYTHONPATH correctly, but it's definitely untested and unsupported.
As to whether it's legal or not, IANAL and won't make any official claims about that. Since the FSF owns the copyright, you'll need to ask them:
http://www.fsf.org/about/contact/emailMy gut feeling is that it would not be legal.
-Barry