[b6]

I think you're missing something if that's what you got out of qmail. The main idea I internalized was, if you find yourself making programming mistakes, take some time to write an API that does not allow you to make that kind of mistake and commit to using it everywhere.

The licensing stuff, I'm not super clear on. If memory serves, DJB did not want to worry about bugs introduced by patches he'd never seen or approved, added by package maintainers for OSes he didn't use.

As for the somewhat weird ecosystem (daemontools), I think it wasn't that it wasn't good enough, it was just that people always find reasons to be dissatisfied. I can't even keep track of the latest reinvention of whatever people are using instead of daemontools, but I bet it's a hundred times as complex, and much less reliable.

[JdeBP]

The licensing stuff was simple: There wasn't a licence. Some people creatively misinterpreted M. Bernstein's page, explaining what one could do under the law in the U.S. as it stood even without a copyright licence, as a licence. But that was a misinterpretation.

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/law-licence-free-softwares.html

Daemontools ironically wasn't weird at all, as evidenced by the fact that over the past almost two decades the daemontools world got us changes to softwares, all of those do not daemonize options that have appeared in that time as well as things like removing mysql_safe and other Poor Man's Dæmon Supervisors, that made it a lot easier to use those softwares with other service managers.

* http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/mariadb-and-mysql.html#Promp...

Some of the things that people use instead of daemontools are not much less reliable. (-:

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/daemontools-family.html