Users of one of the best SPAM filters SpamAssassin may want to take a look at the license this time around in the new version 3.0. Because SpamAssassin has now adopted Apache"s License. This move was anything but easy as it took several months to work out all the kinks, but in the end it was worth it claims members of the SpamAssassin team.
Previous versions of SpamAssassin where released under two licenses. The first and most popular one is the General Public License (GPL) and the Perl Artistic License. SpamAssassin claims that the two licenses caused confusion for handling software contributions. Plus this new license covers more legal resources. One of the new features present in version 3.0 is the support for Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which can trace e-mail origins of a Spammer. With any luck the government will step in and press charges.
It"s great to see the SpamAssassin team working on a better license. Especially since the older ones in part would have caused SpamAssassin in the future some problems (legal disputes). No doubt other companies will release their own anti-spam framework, but my moneys on SpamAssassin"s Sender Policy Framework (SPF).